


Tornado Warning

by dear_tiger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-02
Updated: 2012-08-02
Packaged: 2017-11-11 06:34:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/475602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_tiger/pseuds/dear_tiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A failed attempt to restore Sam’s soul leaves roboSam with a demonic infestation. He and Dean set off across the country, searching for a way to reverse the damage. Elsewhere, an amnesiac ex-con lands a job at the Winchester Meat butcher shop, gets harassed by local monsters and falls in love with the sheriff. There are two stories that develop independently, and the connection is a name, and the name is a memory, and memories are hard to come by. But what you gotta remember first and foremost, sonny, is to watch out for the tornado.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tornado Warning

**Author's Note:**

> The art is created by miki_moo. [Art Master Post](http://miki-moo.livejournal.com/35905.html)

There are three places in the body where the soul is supposed to be anchored. The soul, of course, exists on an entirely different, non-physical plane, but if you want the body to carry it around, there have to be points of connection. If you don’t anchor it, the first time the human sneezes, watch that soul float away into the stratosphere. 

Take a soul. Loop twice around the sternal notch and tuck it behind the bone. This is part of the reason it hurts so much to get kicked in the solar plexus. Pinch a little piece of the soul – half an inch by physical measures – between the third and the fourth thoracic vertebrae. Tuck another corner into the foramen magnum of the skull, where the spinal cord comes in. Do not, under any circumstances, put the soul in upside down and tuck the corner into the inlet of pelvis, or the individual will spend the rest of his life thinking with his downstairs brain. Such things are okay in the general population but highly undesirable for those few whose soul an angel puts in by hand. The special attention usually means the human has an important role to play, which is certainly not fornicating indiscriminately, getting the soul tickled.

Attachment of a human soul is a delicate, precise operation, and it wasn’t Castiel who did it with Dean. How was he supposed to know? He thought you just sort of shove it in there. 

There is a thick manual written on the subject of soul placement. Castiel flips through it when he gets five minutes of free time. Who would have ever thought that even this procedure has so many rules, so many dos and don’ts? There is another manual sitting next to it, and that one is meant for cherubs. Castiel eyes it while he’s flipping pages.

_Once you have plucked the soul from the repository, it ought to be shaken off._

Castiel sighs. He didn’t do that.

“It’s important,” says the old angel who lent Cas the book. “If you get two souls in a growing body, they will try to split the body and you get conjoined twins. The mortality rates are truly unfortunate. It happens.”

“And—” Cas swallows his unease. “And if you pluck a soul from Hell?”

“Eh? From Hell?”

The soul looked a little too large at the time. But he thought it was normal because Sam Winchester is a large man. That’s what he gets for rushing things the second time – not only did he misplace the soul but he brought something extra out of Hell with it. Hopefully, not the Devil. Castiel thinks he would’ve noticed if he accidentally picked up the Devil.

Well, shit.

 

**NOLI ME TANGERE**

_Cartoonists … might have been right about the potentially subversive or maniacal ways that objects would behave, if only they could.  
(F. Prose._ Love for sale: appraising the relics of a relationship)

 

Sam wakes up with a start and is instantly aware that he had just been asleep a second ago, for the first time in a year and a half. It feels weird, like coming out of deep unconsciousness when the world was there and perfectly fine one moment, blink, and you’re on the ground. He doesn’t like this little glitch in his bodily functions.

Dean is still asleep on his stomach, drooling a little onto the pillow and clutching the knife under it like a teddy bear. Sam stands next to his face and leans down closer. He wonders if Dean is responsible in some way for the little physiological hiccup – he has been responsible for others in the past. But Dean sleeps on, oblivious. Sam notes the tension in his face and in the way he’s hugging the pillow, evident in the uncomfortable set of his shoulders. Dean doesn't trust him and is nervous about sleeping in the same room. Pity. What’s Sam going to do to him in his sleep, and why would he want to do it?

Dean’s breath stirs a lock of Sam’s hair. Sam backs off. 

He checks the salt lines just in case but doesn’t find anything amiss. He walks into the bathroom and leaves the lights off and the door open to let in whatever weak light filters through the shades from the parking lot. Someone plugged in a night light into the bathroom outlet at some point, forgot it on check out, and the housekeepers never bothered to remove it. It’s shaped like a snowman in a red hat, holding a Christmas tree to its chest, or rather, its middle ball. 

In the low glow of the snowman, Sam pulls off his shirt and studies his frame in the mirror. There’re a few bruises and a stitched up gash on his left bicep covered by a bandage, but other than that, everything looks normal. Sam twists to check his back. Shadows pool on one side of his spinal column and in the small of his back. Sam turns forward again, presses on his ribs and pushes a finger into his stomach. The last action gives him a funny sensation, so he repeats it. He relaxes the abdominal muscles and presses in with his thumb just below the belly button. The feeling is odd but weak enough. Sam waits to see what else will happen. Nothing does.

Years and years ago, when he was little, Sam used to be fascinated with his body. He would poke and prod and tug at it until it bled, eventually leading John to think he was some kind of premature self-mutilator. Which Sam wasn’t. He didn’t enjoy the pain from picking at the corner of his fingernail, and he didn’t do it for punishment; he was just curious. Dean’s body, too, was the source of his preoccupation, though some vague intuition told Sam early on to keep that one to himself.

The queasy feeling returns. Sam breathes through his nose and waits for it to pass. He is standing in front of the mirror, biting the inside of his cheek to fight off the nausea, and this is when his reflection blinks without him. 

Sam doesn’t have time to do anything. His stomach twists on itself and pushes up so suddenly that he barely manages to step to the side and bend over the toilet before he’s throwing up.

“Sam?”

The bedcovers rustle and Dean’s footsteps creak over the motel’s floorboards. Out of the corner of his eye, through a sheen of tears, Sam can see him stop in the doorway. _Go away,_ Sam thinks. And then he thinks, _Bring me some water._ It’s an unpleasantly shy thought, and he knows he’d make that questioning inflection at the end were he to say it aloud. Sam is just hoping he can stop heaving for long enough to draw a breath.

When the spasms settle and Sam is able to lift his head out of the toilet, Dean is holding a glass of water out to him. Sam takes it, rinses his mouth and spits in the bowl before taking a drink. 

“I don’t know what that was all about,” he says.

“Feeling better?” Dean is painted in the snowman’s colored lights, and somehow, the shadows exaggerate his facial expressions. He looks seriously worried, when he probably only meant to show slight concern.

“I wasn’t feeling bad in the first place. Just threw up all of a sudden, for no reason.” Sam rubs a hand over his mouth and flushes the toilet to get rid of the acidic smell. The inside of his mouth tastes bitter, and his latest dinner is making an appearance as a slight aftertaste, which makes everything even more disgusting. 

Sam takes another drink from the glass and picks himself up off the floor. He leans over the sink, unmindful that he’s getting into Dean’s personal space, and peers at his face. It repeats every grimace he makes. He pulls one eyelid down and studies its underside but doesn’t notice anything interesting. 

Dean doesn’t move away, watching these manipulations closely. “You got something in your eye?” 

Sam is about to say no, to tell him to go back to sleep, but a thought strikes him. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s bothering me – would you look?”

Dean huffs out a breath and hits the light switch. “C’mere.” Sam shuffles forward, closing the last few inches between them. Dean takes his face in his hands and leans closer. He pulls Sam’s eyelid down with the tip of his finger – a gentle, warm touch on the thin skin that feels extremely good. “Look up.” Sam does so, studies the blurred contours of his upper eyelids and bites his lip against a grin. “I don’t see anything.” 

He looks straight again, and there’s Dean right in front of him, neck stretched out, eyebrows drawn together in concentration. “Oh,” says Sam. “Must’ve been an eyelash.” He puffs out a tiny breath that touches Dean’s eyelashes and causes him to blink reflexively. He stops staring at Sam’s eyeball and meets his gaze. Sam tilts his head to the side and opens his lips by a fraction. Realization spreads over Dean’s face. He drops his hands and takes a step back, into the room, bumping the light switch with his elbow. The bathroom and the room beyond plunge into darkness again and the snowman hurries to compensate.

Dean is adorable in his stubborn denial. Sam picks up a toothbrush and squeezes out a short caterpillar of toothpaste on it. There’s a funny feeling in his chest, something old and familiar from before, something that used to come with an emotion but has long since been detached from it. “Not tonight then,” he says and sticks the toothbrush behind his cheek.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sam.” The expression on Dean’s face just seconds ago indicated very clearly that he knows exactly what Sam is talking about. 

Sam finishes brushing his teeth and rinses out his mouth. By then, Dean has somewhat relaxed and gone back to the bed. “Pity,” Sam says, and in the mirror he sees his brother freeze with one leg up on the bed. “You’re the one who used to tell me all the time that it’s good for a man to get laid.” 

Dean hates it when Sam brings up “before” and “used to”, like he wants to pretend they’ve just met this year. Sam does it anyway and wouldn’t be able to say why. 

“No shit, huh? I said that.” Dean puts both feet back down on the floor and sits up straighter. “It looks like you’re taking my advice to heart, dude. I gotta watch my mouth from now on.”

Sam sighs. He turns away from the mirror and leans against the doorframe, still shirtless. “Nah,” he says, “watch mine.” And he licks his lips, slow and deliberate and openly pornographic. 

Dean’s face turns such a brilliant shade of red it practically glows in the dark. It can probably compete with the snowman’s hat. “Dude, you’re seriously fucked in the head, you know that? You better not be saying what I think you’re saying.”

“You know it, bro.” 

“Jesus Christ, Sam, I swear to god—”

Sam crosses the stretch of worn carpet and drops to his knees in front of Dean, grabbing his thighs before he can pull away. The muscles feel stone hard under his hands.

“You know it. You want it, I want it, so why not? I’ll make it good.”

“Sam.” Dean puts his hand on the back of Sam’s neck, in a big brother kind of way, like he wants to secure his attention and not push his head down and forward like Sam is hoping he would. “Sam, look, I know you’re out of your head right now, but you can’t say shit like that to me, okay?” He punctuates his words with a little shake. His fingers snag in Sam’s hair, not unpleasantly but, regretfully, nothing about the act is erotic. “I don’t know where these ideas of yours are coming from, but trust me, they’re bad ideas. It’s like when I say you can’t call the crazy lady crazy to her face.” He gets a familiar smirk, and Sam can sense a quote coming. “You can’t just go around killing people, right?”

“Huh. Thanks, Connor.” Sam smiles the most innocent smile and places a palm on Dean’s crotch. He gets one stroke in before Dean pushes him away – with a foot to the shoulder, no less. Sam shrugs. “You’ll live.” 

He wants to play more, thinks he can push it further tonight, but it all goes to hell when the next wave of sickness hits out of nowhere, without warning. Sam realizes he has no time to get up and scrambles for the bathroom on all fours, barely making it before his stomach rejects the water he swallowed earlier, mixed with bitter acid. When he can open his eyes again, Dean is crouching next to him with another glass and a tissue. 

“You know what? That’s what you get for—” Dean pretends to sound pissed but only sounds worried.

“Incest,” Sam coughs out. His throat feels raw. “It’s called incest.”

Dean makes a face at him. “Fine, smartass. Incest. That’s how your body feels about it.” 

“Fuck you. I’m the body.” But he takes the glass and drinks slowly, bracing for another attack of spasms that doesn’t come.

 

**TORNADO WARNING**

_There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the_ aajej, _against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. … There are other, less constant winds that change direction, that can knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The_ bist roz _leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days – burying villages. There is the hot, dry_ ghibli _from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous condition. … There is also the ——, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it. … Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the_ simoom _who were never seen again. One nation was “so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred”.  
(Michael Ondaatje._ The English Patient.) 

 

“It ain’t rocket science.” The shop’s owner picks up a side of beef ribs that looks like it must weigh close to forty pounds and drops it on the counter. The smell of the place is vaguely disturbing – metallic like fresh meat, with an unwelcome addition of that rich, warm aroma of viscera. Danny has only been here for five minutes and it already feels like there’s blood on his tongue and in his lungs. The owner doesn’t seem to be bothered by it, which doesn’t exactly surprise Danny. He used to clock in some hours at the dump – couldn’t smell it to save his life after the first week.

The owner goes on. “All I need is someone with a good back who can haul the meat around and run the register up front without pissing off the customers.” He pauses and gives Danny an appraising look, noting the height, the breadth of his shoulders, and the solid build of his frame. Danny straightens up just a little because hey, flaunt it if you got it. “Yeah, you look like you might do.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He’s given a knife – twelve inch straight blade, expensive Swiss steel and a wooden handle. The owner flips it easily like a circus performer and offers it handle first. “The cut needs to be nice and even,” he explains. “Don’t saw the meat. I can’t sell rib steak that looks like Jason hacked it off with a chainsaw.”

Danny smiles to acknowledge the joke as he weighs the knife in his hand. He draws a mental line along the side of one rib and then presses the blade in one smooth stroke, all the way to the cutting board, and drags it across. The knife is a beautiful piece of equipment, sharp as a scalpel and heavy just where it needs to be, and it slices the steak off clean. It gives Danny a little buzz of appreciation to be working with such a thing.

The owner studies the cut and gives a satisfied nod. “What was your name again?”

“Broflovski, sir. Danny Broflovski.”

“Like in _South Park?_ ”

Danny shrugs, returning the knife. “I wouldn’t know.” 

He gets a curious look but no comment. The guy has the kind of eyes that women envy, dark and shiny, with thick eyelashes that give him the air of a sensitive man. Danny watches the bulge of muscles in his forearm and the precise, measured roll of his shoulder as he begins to cut the rack of ribs into individual steaks. He tries to remember the motions in case he might need them later. Hell, he really hopes to need them later, hopes he gets the job. He takes note of the Marine Corps tattoo on the owner’s forearm, too, and sets the information aside, for building bridges.

“Where’re you from, Danny?”

“Originally, from Kansas. Lately, from California. I’m from all over, really.”

“California, huh?” There’s that measuring look again, this time focused on his face. Danny makes a fist in his pocket until his fingers go numb and forbids himself to squirm, shuffle his feet, pull on his earlobe, or do any of those ridiculous things people are always tempted to do when under close scrutiny. “You an actor?”

There lies an area where Danny normally doesn’t like to go poking around. He remembers putting on a priest’s robe and feeling guilty because he had no right to wear it. There’re vague memories of flashes that he supposes could have been cameras, just like they could have been construction site lights or machine gun fire. He probably should be able to tell the difference but, well. A failed actor is as good a guess as any. 

He says, “I think I was, for a little while. The thing is, Mr.—?” 

“John Winchester.”

“Mr. Winchester. The thing is, I was in a car accident a little while ago, and things from the past are a little blurry sometimes.” He mentally runs over what he just said and quickly adds, “But I don’t have any trouble remembering new things. It’s just past memories.” Sometimes he has no idea what order the months of the year are supposed to come in, but, Danny figures, too much information.

Mr. Winchester scratches the dark stubble on his chin. “Interesting.”

_Don’t say it,_ Danny tells himself. _Don’t say it._ He says it anyway. “Winchester – like the gun?”

That earns him a wide grin. “Yeah, like the gun. No relation.” The owner begins to stack up the steaks, cheesecloth between them. “Winchester Meat is a local operation. I buy from local ranchers, and I guarantee that the meat is the best in the state.” He nods toward the back, and Danny glances in that direction automatically. “I added a grill out back. The best damn barbecue in northern Texas. _Bon Appetit_ says so. I’ve got competition in Austin, or it would’ve been the best in the whole state.” 

Danny feels himself beginning to drift and makes an effort to focus. He’s been having trouble concentrating ever since the accident, but the guy doesn’t need to know that. The memory gaps have caused him to strike out at four places already.

“You done time, boy?”

The sudden change of topic comes out of nowhere and takes Danny by surprise. “Yes, sir,” he says. “Two years at San Quentin. How can you tell?”

“You look the type. So what did you do?” 

What indeed. That’s another gray territory that Danny doesn’t like to wander through. He doesn’t have many memories of prison, and even less of his crime. It bothers him slightly that he is far less curious about the details of his own conviction that he probably should be. 

“Reckless burning,” he says. The owner lifts his eyebrows. “It’s like arson but less severe. I— I don’t remember what I did exactly.” 

Mr. Winchester thinks over the information for a minute. Danny can practically see him turn it over in his head this way and that. “It couldn’t have been that bad if they only gave you two years.” He points the bloody knife at Danny’s chest, half-threat and half-punctuation. “You’re not a pyro, are you? You have any urges to burn things?” 

“If I was, sir, the accident knocked it out of me.” And it’s almost the truth, but not quite the truth. 

The owner seems happy with the response. “You start tomorrow morning at eight. The shop opens at nine.” And before Danny can process it, before it can settle that he has actually – actually! – just been given a job, the guy claps him on the shoulder, unmindful of the bloody palm print he leaves there. “Welcome to Winchester Meat.”

_Meat,_ says the sweet echo in Danny’s chest. _Meat!_ It repeats in his empty stomach. Holy hell, he can soon eat something other than canned beans and tuna. All the chili stands in Texas puff out aromatic steam before his mental eye, inviting him, and all the taco trucks wink at him with rays of sunshine reflected in their metal flanks.

When Danny walks outside, the smell of butcher shop dogs him everywhere, slightly ruining his appetite.

That night, he drives his ancient pickup out of town and parks it off the side of the road where he thinks it won’t bother anybody. He stretches across the front seat, pulls off his shoes and socks, and sticks his feet out the window. He wiggles his toes and pretends to grasp a star between two. 

“It’ll come back,” he tells himself aloud. “You just relax, and it’ll be back before you know it.” 

He used to catch stars between his toes with somebody, he thinks. They had competitions that were impossible to judge. But the more he pokes at the memory, the more obscure it becomes, until it feels like it doesn’t even belong to him and like maybe he made it up. Danny sighs and leaves it alone for the night.

There’s an abused pack of Marlboros under the seat when he sticks his hand there for his bag of salted peanuts. Danny stares at his discovery, thinking that he doesn’t even smoke, not on a regular basis. But the persistent smell of blood won’t go away, so he digs out a lighter from his pocket and presses a cigarette between his lips. 

The thing is, he has no idea who the truck, the cigarettes, or the box of canned tuna in the back belong to. _Later, think about it later._ He clicks the lighter.

The memory doesn’t come like he’d expect it to. Danny thought it would hit him like a truck and perhaps, like in the movies, would knock him to his knees with a blinding headache. Nothing of the sort happens. It comes quietly, more like a soap bubble popping just on the edge of the visual field. Danny hits the striker, and with the flash sees a mental image. It’s a man with his head bent down, hand cupped over the flame that momentarily throws an orange glow on his face. The nose, the forehead, the short hair, the arches of his cheekbones and the plain metal ring on his finger – it all comes back in a second, not a hallucination but a snapshot memory of something Danny saw once and has since forgotten. It makes something surge up in his chest, a rare mixture of irritation and love that catches Danny unprepared with its intensity. 

He thinks he might have a brother somewhere out there. 

 

**NOLI ME TANGERE**

When Sam presses on his stomach, it hurts, especially in that area right above the belt. It hurts, so he gets into the habit of doing it more – to see if it will go away. It’s like checking the mailbox every twenty minutes for that message you’ve been waiting for. It’s unreasonable, but Sam wants the pain to go away, so he presses in. Nope, still there.

“What are you doing?”

Dean knows all his habits of course, recognizes all his behavioral patterns. It’s part of the reason why Sam wanted to hunt with him again: things get done faster when your partner can read your face.

“It hurts. I think maybe I got some stomach bug.” 

“Well, stop poking at it then. Is it the same stuff from three days ago, when you were throwing up?”

“How would I know?”

The waitress comes back with their coffee. She’s not terribly attractive, and Sam doesn’t feel like flirting, especially with the pain bothering him, so he sticks to ordering breakfast. Dean rattles off his own order but when she’s about to leave, Sam catches her elbow.

“Sweetheart, would you point me toward the bathrooms?”

“Sure. They’re in the back over there.” 

“Thanks. Be right back,” he tells Dean, who nods and turns to stare out the window. He has taken to that habit lately. 

The cramps hit him two feet from the bathroom door, but Sam makes it without bending in half in the dining area. He drops to his knees once inside and concentrates hard on breathing through his nose. In and out, in and out, shallow but not too fast. 

Something is beating and fluttering in his stomach.

The door opens behind him and he hears footsteps halter. “Oh.” The voice is unfamiliar. “Are you okay?”

Sam draws in a tiny breath, huffs it out, draws another one. “Go fuck yourself.”

Whoever it is hesitates, steps from foot to foot but backs out of the bathroom. When he’s alone again, Sam pushes up his shirt and looks down at his abdomen. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting to see – maybe an alien resistance leader pushing out of him, complete with a beret and a Cuban cigar. But everything looks same as always. Sam tries to think of what organs are in the area and what might be causing the pain. It’s too far toward the center for appendicitis, and he can’t think of anything but endless coils of intestine that occupies the area.

But what’s with the fluttering?

When the pain has melted away, Sam pulls himself up by grabbing onto the sink. He looks in the mirror at his pale face. _I should see a doctor._ He runs the tap water until it’s cold and splashes it in his face. He looks up again, and his reflection is squinting at him blearily, like it only woke up a minute ago. 

“Okay,” Sam says. “Okay.” The reflection doesn’t repeat it.

Sam-in-the-Mirror has the same face and wears the same clothes. He is blinking the same water droplets out of very different eyes, though. They’re the same shape and color, Sam notes when he leans in closer, but they look… different. 

Dean is still studying the parking lot outside the window when Sam returns. Dean looks unhappy these days, and particularly so this morning, like maybe he had a wonderful dream and can’t stand reality now that he’s awake.

Their food arrives just as Sam sits down again. He smiles for show but can’t wait for the waitress to leave. 

“We have a problem,” he says as soon as she’s gone.

Dean, who has started poking at his pancakes, pauses. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I think something’s in me.” The pain has subsided to a mild fluttering sensation. It’s like a serious case of slightly misplaced butterflies the size of pterodactyls. “I can feel something in my gut.” 

Dean’s eyes slide down to where Sam’s pressing his hand over the sore spot. “And you don’t think it’s a stomach bug anymore?”

“Then it’s one big fucker.” Something – Sam decides to call it Butterfly – bounces up, producing a new wave of nausea. “Dean, it’s moving around.”

Dean glances around the diner. Their waitress is on the other end of the room, taking an order from a family of five. They are about three hours away from Disneyland, and there are more families around than usual, though none are looking at them. Dean puts down his fork next to his mutilated pancakes and gestures for Sam to move closer before he bends down to stick an arm under the table. Sam feels it bump against his knee and crawl up. He takes Dean’s hand and places it in the right spot, just as the thing inside lurches against his abdominal muscles. 

The impact should have been palpable but Dean’s face doesn’t change. He is half-lying on the table with one shoulder entirely underneath it, and now a couple of teenagers from the next table are staring. Sam has no idea why Dean couldn’t just come around the table and do this in the open because it’s not as if he isn’t being weird already. 

Butterfly jumps again. Now it feels like there’s more than one, pushing and squirming inside.

“Don’t you feel that?”

Dean frowns. “It’s kinda… warm-ish?” 

Now there’re four people staring at them. Sam lets go and scoots back in his seat; it occurred to him that they might get kicked out if they act funny, and he hasn’t even touched his breakfast yet. Fucking Butterfly. Dean straightens up, looking worried. 

 

**TORNADO WARNING**

Danny pauses with a sponge in the air, dripping soapy water on the counter. The song playing on the radio has snagged onto something in his hole-ridden memory. The next moment, he smiles, recognizing The Cure’s “Lullaby”, and turns up the dial.

By himself in the back of the shop, with no customers and no owner in sight, Danny feels alone in the world, and the sensation is only intensified by the storm encroaching on the little building. At one o’clock, the overhead lights are lit to fight the darkness of the afternoon. Danny imagines himself to be the only survivor of a submarine crew, descending deeper and deeper into the ocean, out of his control, to the sounds of a creepy song. And damn but there used to be two of them, with a beautiful machine and a radio to share.

_You’re a moron, Broflovski. Who the hell misses the brother he hallucinated the night before?_

The lights flicker, and the static on the radio swallows Danny’s favorite line.

The storm blew in around two in the morning. Danny woke up when the wind started rocking his truck, rising clouds of dust all around it. In the first moments of sleepy confusion he thought he was in hell. He drove into town, feeling achy and out of his head after only three hours of sleep, ate a can of tuna for breakfast in a parking lot behind the laundromat and spent the rest of the night watching the wind swing one of the town’s two streetlights above the empty intersection. It didn’t get much brighter when the sun rose, with the heaping storm clouds sucking out all the light. 

The owner’s heavy footsteps creak in the far corner on the floor above, where the man’s living quarters are. He wears his steel-toed boots everywhere around the apartment, even in the bathroom, which is above the shop bathroom on the ground floor, and probably in the shower, but apparently not in his bedroom. It sounds like bare feet dragging on every step. Danny idly wonders what John might be doing at the moment. He dips the sponge into the water again and wipes the bloody smudges off the counter.

The chime of the little bell above the front door jerks Danny out of his thoughts. He briefly glances outside, notes the darkness and the almost horizontal rain. “Just a second!” He wipes his hands on a towel and makes his way into the store. An old lady peering at the sausages in the display case looks up when Danny comes out and appears absolutely delighted to see him. Her tiny body is swimming in a yellow raincoat, and with an addition of red rubber boots she looks like someone out of a story book. The second customer is a half-naked man with the head of a bull.

Danny stops. He makes himself take a slow breath and closes his eyes for a minute. There’s not going to be a Minotaur in the store when he opens them. Maybe there’ll be a biker in his place or no man at all, only an empty spot where his imagination just placed a piece of mythology a second ago. Danny opens his eyes, and the bull-headed man is still there, in the middle of the meat store, just a few steps behind the woman. He has a large bronze ring in his nose. 

“Okay,” Danny says out loud. “Yeah, alright.” So he’s gone nuts then. That’s just great.

“Are you okay?” says the woman. “You looked a little pale for a minute. Shouldn’t drink so much coffee, you know.” 

Danny swallows, feeling how dry his throat has gone. “You’re probably right, ma’am. I just got a little lightheaded for a second there.” 

“Like I said,” she shrugs, “shouldn’t drink so much coffee. My granddaughter always guzzles the stuff and pisses like a racehorse all day long. Bad for your blood pressure is all I’m saying.” 

The bull-man behind her is quiet. Out of the corner of his eye, Danny sees the shine of oil on his bare chest and stomach, the dried patches of urine on his loincloth. A tail covered in coarse hair hangs between his legs. He reeks of animal, of sweat and wet hair, and mixed with the persistent coppery smell of the shop, it nearly makes Danny gag. He forces a smile. 

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You do that.” She shakes a finger at him. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

_Don’t look at the bull. It’s not a bull anyway._ “Yes, ma’am. I— I like this town. A lot.” He looks at the bull. The bull inclines his head, either as a greeting or as a demonstration of his horns, and slowly winks at Danny. 

The woman turns around and looks straight at the monster. “I’m not holding you up with my chit-chat, am I?” she says in a tone of voice that almost dares him to raise a protest. He shakes his shaggy head. The woman nods and turns her attention back to Danny. “I’ll have two pounds of these sausages then. Wrap them up twice – I don’t want anything leaking in my bag.” 

“Of course.” Danny weighs out two pounds. _It’s just a man._ The smell is abominable, so thick it’s almost palpable. He tells himself it can’t be worse than the dump. He tells himself it can’t be worse than an open grave. The next second, he has no idea where the thought about graves came from. Maybe he used to clock in some hours at the cemetery, too, while at San Quentin. _Doing what exactly – digging up ripe corpses?_

“So how about this weather?” says the old woman. Nobody answers.

Danny’s heart is beating in his throat, and he wonders if he’s going to have a panic attack. Maybe this is how people go postal: one minute they’re stamping envelopes, and the next one, monsters have surrounded them. He read something once about strange smells reported by brain trauma patients. Perhaps this is what’s happening to him now – a small seizure, a local short circuit. 

When he looks up, the bull shakes his head, making the nose ring sway. _Just a man._

“Thank you,” says the lady when she’s handed her parcel, which she hides in the depths of her raincoat. “Tell John that Maura said hi.” 

Danny doesn’t look as she walks out the door. He sees it close out of the corner of his eye, and a minute later, a low rumbling of her truck’s engine carries out of the parking lot. The bull hasn’t moved from his spot. With his disproportionate head, he’s taller than Danny. His hands end in fingers but on his feet are dull black hooves. Danny studies the mess of his legs – the long arched foot of a ruminant above the hoof, the sharp heel lifted off the floor, the short lower leg attached to an entirely human knee that looks strained at the strange angle. His skin is human, which, somehow, is particularly disturbing.

Danny clears his throat. “Hi. How can I help you?” 

The bull tips his head. A drop of moisture falls from his left nostril and lands on the floor. 

“Sir?”

A sudden mechanical wail rises outside and makes Danny’s racing heart jerk painfully in his chest, and for a moment he thinks, this is it, there goes the last piece of his sanity. The sound is overwhelming, penetrating, the kind that makes one’s insides vibrate. It’s like something out of an old movie, a World War II air raid siren. The sound rises and rises, drops to a mournful low moan, and starts up again. 

_“This is a tornado warning. Please take cover immediately. This is a tornado warning.”_

Danny looks at the bull and meets his eyes – huge and moist, with velvety irises. The siren moans outside, up and down and up again. The bull huffs out a small breath that sounds a lot like a chuckle. And all the lights go out at once. 

The edge of a low counter bites into Danny’s spine when he backs up into it. The darkness is immediately disorienting. Every shadow in the shop, every silhouette has transformed into some hideous shape, and all seem to be moving just when Danny isn’t looking straight at them. _Breathe, goddammit, breathe. There’s the cash register. There’re the freezers._

 _“This is a tornado warning. Please take cover immediately.”_  
He thinks he hears hooves. It’s impossible to be sure, with the storm sirens and the pounding of his heart. Suddenly, the sound of hooves is right there, not two feet away, and Danny has only a moment to turn that way before fingers grasp his throat. 

The world goes from black to red. Danny gapes and grabs the wrists in front of him. He’s never thought of himself as a small guy, but he might as well be twisting iron railing for all the yield he gets. The bull is larger. Danny can feel the blood pooling in his neck veins, like his head is going to explode. He backs away, throws himself to the side, hits something in the dark and hears metal rain down to the floor. The grip on his neck doesn’t weaken. The smell of animal is overpowering, having taken over the whole world.

_“This is a tornado warning. Please take cover…”_

The pressure in his head muffles all sounds. Danny twists and jerks around and can’t tell anymore if he’s hitting the walls or the display case, or even if he’s still upright. The next moment, he realizes he has been upright as his knees start to buckle.

_The knees._

An image comes back from the red fog in his head – of painfully strained human knees over bull’s lower legs. Danny kicks out, feels it connect, feels the sickening slide of bones and ligaments through the sole of his foot. The bull roars in pain, and the fingers on Danny’s throat let go. 

It’s like being covered by a tidal wave. Danny’s own knees hit the floor, and everything disappears. 

 

**NOLI ME TANGERE**

They hit San Francisco’s Chinatown on a warm winter day, simultaneously with a tourist crowd and what appears to be half of the local population. It’s not until Dean hears the erratic beat of drums and cymbals and sees a parade rolling down the hill toward them that he even realizes it must be the Chinese New Year.

“Bad timing,” says Sam, looking the same direction. “I forgot it was the New Year.”

The parade is just a small local affair, nothing like the grand event that’s scheduled to happen later at night elsewhere in the city. Still, Dean can’t remember the last time he saw a real parade. It must’ve been in Minnesota seven or eight years ago, with the butter beauty queens. This one is still too far to distinguish details, and it’s mostly just flashes of sparkles and bright fabrics, with a few acrobats hobbling above the crowd on props. An occasional beast – _Lions or dragons, or what are they supposed to be?_ – leaps up into the air sometimes. Dean stretches his neck to see better. A long blue-green body of a dragon rolls and dances above the crowd’s heads, held up on sticks by invisible carriers.

Sam pokes him in the side. “Hey. You have the address?”

“Yeah, hang on.”

Sam – the old Sam, the way he used to be before something yanked him out of hell and left a piece behind – that Sam would’ve appreciated the parade. Dean needs to stop thinking about his brother like he’s dead. He roots around in his pockets until he finds the right piece of paper among crumpled notes and gas station receipts. 

“It’s number 303,” he says. Up and down, the street is crowded with locals and tourists, and people keep getting in front of building numbers. “Wherever that’s supposed to be.”

“This way.” 

Sam turns and starts up the street, toward the parade. Dean falls in step with him.

“How come you know the way?”

Sam shrugs, points at somewhere across the street, and Dean turns to look at a small restaurant tucked in an alley. “That place over there serves some really awesome soup. I came here on school break once with a friend, and then later with Jessica. It was a thing. We wanted to try all the soups in Chinatown.” 

Soups are a waste of food, as far as Dean’s concerned: too much water and not enough sustenance. He tries to picture Sam on his soup spree in San Francisco years ago. Huh. Maybe they could repeat it this year, which he doubts, but maybe….

The parade catches up at the next intersection. Little girls dressed in all blue walk by, beating on small drums, flanked on both sides by older instructors. They’re followed by acrobats in bunny ears, and Dean thinks, _It’s the year of the Rabbit._ More little girls, this time in red. Sam gets handed a pair of bunny ears, which he won’t accept, so Dean takes them from the girl instead and walks with them like an idiot, tapping the ends against his thigh. The music is shrill and loud, some kind of a weird melody that sounds like cacophony if one listens too closely. The beating of drums gets Dean’s heart pumping faster. The lions – or dragons – come next. They’re blue and red, they dance and leap and duck, snap their jaws at the crowd, and beat their eyelashes with loud mechanical clicks. 

“So this doctor,” says Sam. Somebody throws glitter at them, and Dean has to dust it off his jacket at Sam. He gets a less than amused look for his efforts. “Quit it, Dean. The doctor.”

“What about him?”

“Is he a hunter?”

Dean watches the magical beasts dance. It’s the lack of plan or coordination between the ass and the head that gives their movements that wild character. One yellow lion-dragon thing turns toward him and bobs its head from side to side, snapping at him. Its ass leaps around on its own accord.

“Dean!”

“Yes, yes, keep your panties on.” The lion moves on, and Dean turns to Sam again. “I was just looking. Anyway, this doctor – Dr. Robert – he doesn’t hunt, but he knows about our kind of stuff. Dad used to go to him.”

Sam frowns. “I don’t remember.”

“I never met the guy either. He’s one of Dad’s old contacts.”

Six or seven people walk by, holding up the dragon on poles that drew Dean’s attention earlier. They pause and make loops around each other, and the blue dragon twists on itself and flows above their heads. 

“Why Chinatown?” Sam says.

“He practices out of the back of some store. Doc used to work in ER but got busted a few years back for lifting opiates. He was giving them to hunters and maybe had a little problem of his own, I don’t know.” 

“Right,” says Sam. Dean doesn’t like the way he stretches out the word. “303, over here.” 

The place that Dr. Robert has picked for his business turns out to be a butcher shop, and it makes Dean’s neck hair stand up on end when he thinks of all the microscopic traces of blood possibly lingering inside the slashes left by knives in the cutting boards and attracting bacteria. _Relax. It’s not like the guy does surgeries in the butcher shop in the back._ Still, the thought of having Sam examined here makes Dean wish they had gone to a regular hospital. _Yeah, and tell them there’s possibly a supernatural parasite in his intestines._ Dean eyes the display cases with their tubs of ground meat, steaks and various body parts that he doesn’t think humans should be eating at all. 

Sam doesn’t seem bothered by any of it. The guy at the counter points toward the back before they ask, and Sam follows without question. They walk up the stairwell that looks just plain dirty, and Dean isn’t imagining that one. The doctor is already waiting on the second landing when they come up there. 

“Winchester boys,” he says. Dr. Robert is a short man in his sixties, with square glasses that he peers over and tufts of white hair and a Cheshire cat smile. He shakes Sam’s hand and claps Dean on the shoulder. “I heard you were dead.”

Sam gives him a pleasant and thoroughly fake smile. Dean suddenly feels uncomfortable. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“True, very true. I’m glad you’re not.” 

“So are we,” says Sam.

Dean has been expecting to see a squalid room, has been bracing for it and ready to yank Sam out of there even if he has to carry him. But the office where Dr. Robert takes them appears clean. Light filters through shades drawn over large windows and falls on the examination table in the center. Dean takes in the room carefully, checking the desk, the medical monitoring equipment pushed into the corner, the small fridge in another corner. The parade is receding down the street. Dean realizes he still has the bunny ears in his hand and looks for a place to put them down. When he turns back around, Sam is watching him with an unreadable expression.

“Satisfied?” says Dr. Robert. “Please don’t worry yourself; you’re safe. Shall we?”

Dean passes him the money, which Dr. Robert puts away without counting. 

“I heard John passed away,” says the doctor while Sam is stripping to his jeans. “I do hope that one is just a rumor, too.”

Dean shakes his head. “No, that one’s true.” He looks around for a place to sit. There’s an old chair in the corner with a cushion that looks like somebody pissed or possibly bled on it at one point. He sits on the edge of the desk instead. 

“I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you.” 

“Okay,” says Sam. “I’m ready.”

Sam’s body has changed since the last time Dean saw him undressed in daylight. It’s not as if Sam was pudgy before, but now the muscles stand out in sharper contrast under his skin. From where he’s sitting, Dean studies his stomach, chest and shoulders. Sam appears more sculpted – probably from having nothing better to do at night but exercise. He meets Sam’s eyes, and there’s a spark there, the heavy look that instantly reminds Dean of that night a week ago when Sam decided to grope him out of the blue.

Dr. Robert shoots them both a curious look but doesn’t comment.

_There once was a guy who…_ The line just surfaces in Dean’s memory, for the second time that day. He has no idea how it’s supposed to end.

“Let’s see then.” Dr. Robert rubs his hands together to warm them while Sam stretches out on the examination table. He runs his hands over Sam’s abdomen, pokes here and there as if he’s testing the territory. “What did you say you’ve been feeling?”

“Something was moving inside of me. It’s been quiet in the past few hours. It hurts.”

“Made him throw up a couple of times, too,” Dean adds. “We thought it was a stomach bug.”

The doctor’s hands move to Sam’s lower abdomen and press in, and some trace of grimace flickers across Sam’s face. “That hurts a little.” 

Dr. Robert presses to the side of the sore spot, and Sam shakes his head. “Can you feel it moving now?”

“No. It’s quiet.”

After two more minutes and a lot of poking around Sam’s stomach, the doctor steps away and lets Sam sit up. “There’s nothing,” he says, “Nothing large enough or solid enough for me to find by palpation.”

“You sure?” Dean says.

“I’m sure, son. I won’t guarantee there’s nothing medically wrong there, but I do promise you there’s no invader in your intestines as big as you describe.” 

Dean has been watching Sam’s face, or he would have missed some tiny change in it, some sudden thoughtfulness that he doesn’t like for some reason.

 

**TORNADO WARNING**

It’s raining, the kind of shy drizzle that falls from remainders of storm clouds on a sunny day. The storm has passed by and the sun is back in full force, roasting Danny’s shoulders under the t-shirt. He bends his head forward and rubs at the back of his neck, mixing sweat and rain there. The dull relentless pain in his neck and throat grows stronger at the motion.

Earlier, John Winchester picked him up from the floor and sent him to the bathroom to get some cold water and throw up if he felt like it. Danny didn’t feel like it. He stood in front of the mirror and stared at the purple marks on his neck and tried to twist his own hands around to see if he’d done it to himself. He was glad to see he couldn’t match his hands to the bruises, and then he didn’t know what he was so happy about – some maniac just tried to choke him.

Turns out, John called the sheriff while Danny was in the bathroom. And why wouldn’t he?

Danny doesn’t look up when he hears gravel crunching under the tires, or when the door slams and footsteps get near and stop in front of him. Danny studies the boots and the seams on the uniform pants – the largest part of the sheriff he can see without moving his head – and wonders if he’s still nuts, and if so, whether he can pass for a normal person in a conversation. He’d bet it feels very real to those guys that think the government has installed cameras into their eyes. They probably feel like they’re passing for normal, too. 

“Hey, big guy,” says the sheriff. “Rough day?”

Danny stares at the mud lining the curb he’s sitting on. The sheriff’s boots hover in his peripheral vision. “Yup.” He probably should’ve added ‘sir’, but he doesn’t have it in him at the moment. 

The boots move to the left, and a moment later, the man lowers himself on the curb next to Danny who moves instinctively to make space. He feels an arm brush against his, and he turns to look then, through the screaming protest of his neck muscles. The sheriff is about his age, he guesses. Danny starts with the clear line of his jaw, carefully shaven probably in accordance with protocol, studies the full lips, the nose, the dusting of freckles that stand out in the middle of summer. The sheriff is the most handsome man Danny has ever seen outside of TV. He’s wearing aviators. Of course he is. He looks like a douche, and Danny dislikes him of the spot. 

The sheriff pulls off his sunglasses and tucks them into a shirt pocket. He has green eyes. Danny sits there with his neck twisted and stuck at an uncomfortable angle and waits.

“I’m Sheriff Marsh.”

“Danny Broflovski.” He wonders if he should add that he just got out of prison but decides against it for the moment. “I just moved here from California.” It hurts to speak, a little bit. 

The sheriff squints at him funny, and Danny realizes he has the sun behind his head. “What are you, an actor?” 

_Why does everyone keep asking me that?_ “No,” he says. “I work at the butcher shop.” 

Marsh snorts and bumps Danny’s shoulder with his own. It’s such a familiar gesture, friendly to the point of completely unprofessional, that Danny can only stare. He says, “Excuse me?” because he can’t think of anything better.

“I didn’t say anything.” 

“No. But you just…” That gets him raised eyebrows. Danny waves his hand. “Never mind.” He turns his head slowly, carefully, feeling his muscles scream at the movement, so that he’s mostly facing forward and can see the sheriff out of the corner of his eye. 

“So, Mr. Broflovski, John tells me he went to check on you when the siren went off and found you on the floor.” He puts his hand on Danny’s head unceremoniously and tilts it to the side to get a better look at the bruises. Danny lets it go on for a couple of seconds before twisting out of his grip. The sensation of the man’s hand lingers, warm on his temple. “Easy,” the sheriff says. “You remember who did this to you?”

_A big naked man with the head of a bull. Who needs to lay off the shrooms, me?_ He swallows with a painful click in his throat. “It was a man,” he says. “I don’t remember what he looked like. I must’ve hit my head on the way down. I have a prior head injury.” 

“Do you, now?” He sounds cheerful, like he’s having one hell of a great day, like assaults and tornado warnings just make his morning every time.

Danny can almost feel his hackles rising. “Yeah. Sir.” 

Sheriff Marsh writes it down. “Was the man White, Black, Hispanic?”

“White. Maybe Hispanic. He was tall, about my height.” He sees the sheriff’s eyes slide up and down his body. “I’m six-four.” 

“Did he tell you to empty the cash register, anything like that?” 

“Maybe.” Danny shrugs. “Probably.” 

The sheriff shifts on the curb and Danny feels the press of his shoulder again as he adjusts his position. He’s sitting too close. Perhaps it’s a Texan thing. It’s too personal, too intimate, and it throws Danny out of his comfort zone. One would think that living in a state this big, people would have plenty of room to keep their distance.

“Mr. Broflovski—”

“Look, I don’t remember shit.” Danny doesn’t look up, says it to the dirt by the curb, to the toe of Marsh’s boot. “Don’t tell my boss. I just got this job, and I really need it, but I’ve had this memory problem ever since the accident and just— I’m sick of the fucking tuna, okay? Don’t tell him.” 

“About the tuna, you mean?”

Danny turns his head to stare. The sheriff scratches his nose with the pretense of seriousness, happy with his own joke and trying not to show it. There’s a faint, barely visible line where the bridge of his aviators blocked out the tan, and Danny finds himself fascinated by that little detail. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen anyone’s face in so much detail before, has ever paid attention. 

“I really hate the tuna,” he adds for the lack of better thoughts. 

Sheriff Marsh closes his notebook and returns it to the back pocket of his uniform pants. “Want to stop by the station tonight?”

“What for? I told you, I don’t remember anything about him.” 

Danny sees the corner of the sheriff’s mouth twitch up just a little. “I have chili.”

_Chili._ The word echoes sweetly in Danny’s head and reflects all the way to his stomach. “Isn’t that unprofessional?”

The sheriff shrugs, gets up and dusts off his pants. Danny looks up at him from under his hand and squints to see again, for no reason, the pale line of skin on the bridge of Marsh’s nose. The sheriff puts his aviators back on and walks toward the car. He walks like a cowboy and keeps his hand on his belt as he goes, and Danny stares after him.

**NOLI ME TANGERE**

Dean’s coffee is one pH point away from battery acid, and the first sip burns his tongue. It’s perfect for clearing his head. He drinks it slowly, blowing on the dark liquid for the longest time like a dainty old woman. Everything in the room has certain bitterness to it – the dried herbs in a vase set in the middle of the shawl that doubles as tablecloth, the unsmiling faces of the hostess’s relatives staring down from photographs, and the cigarettes the hostess is chain-smoking. 

Dean watches her hobble around the room with a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth. Periodically, she pulls it out, erupts in a series of thunderous coughs, fans the smoke around her head and puts the cigarette back in. She looks close to sixty years old, with wrinkles that seem to break up her severe face into islands. The most prominent feature of her body is her watermelon breasts locked in an unyielding brassiere. Dean wonders if it hurts – the strain they put on her skin when she undresses. 

She catches him watching, pulls out her cigarette and raises her eyebrows. Dean salutes her with the coffee mug. She snorts, fans the smoke, and sticks the cigarette back in. 

“You have money?” she says. Her accent is strong, prominent like every other thing about her, and unmistakably Eastern European. 

She was addressing Dean, but Sam reaches into his pocket first and hands her a few folded bills. The hostess – Maria Petrovna, a respectful address of first and paternal names, and don’t you dare call her Maria, she’s twice your age and not your girlfriend – the hostess licks her fingertips and counts the money twice before tucking the bills away in her skirt pocket and giving them a loving pat. 

“Okay,” she says. “Which one of you needs…” she frowns over an elusive word and waves her hands in the air, “hockity-pockity?” 

Sam gives Dean one quick unreadable look before stepping forward. “I do, ma’am.”

Maria Petrovna claps her hands and drags a chair from her shawl-covered table to the center of the room, inviting Sam with a gesture to sit. He does so, carefully. The witch pats his head like she’s looking for something in his hair and Sam makes a little displeased face but doesn’t squirm away. Dean almost snorts coffee out of his nose. Sam is almost unrecognizable sometimes with his calm, calculating look, and other times he does these things, these little grimaces and gestures that go straight to Dean’s heart. The problem with doppelgangers is that you can never be sure how much of the original person is hiding in there. 

“You, boy.” Dean snaps out of his thoughts. The witch is standing by Sam’s side with a bowl of water. “You hold this.”

Dean puts down his coffee and takes the bowl from her. The water is so cold it numbs his fingertips through the porcelain. He holds it up over Sam’s head like Maria Petrovna wants him to, and when she’s happy with the position, she hobbles off into the kitchen. Sam twists his head around to watch her go, obviously noting the roll of her solid buttocks under the skirt. He looks up at Dean.

“What?” Dean whispers. “What’s wrong with you?”

Sam snorts and, hearing the witch’s creaking footsteps approach from the kitchen, sits straight again, with the top of his head under the bowl Dean is holding. Maria Petrovna comes back with a little pot emanating the smell of hot wax. She apparently replaced her burnt-out cigarette with a fresh one while in the kitchen.

“You hold still,” she says, though Dean is unsure whether she’s talking to him or Sam. He freezes, just in case.

Even sitting down, Sam is too tall for her, and the bowl in Dean’s hands is at her eye level. She pulls out a short stool from under the table with her foot and, with a sigh, rests a hand on Dean’s shoulder, unasked, to help her climb up. The ancient piece of furniture moans under her weight, and for a second Dean is afraid she’ll tumble down, two hundred pounds of Slavic witch plus a bowl of hot wax, but she balances herself out. “You worry too much,” she says, catching his eyes. “Now be quiet.” 

Dean hasn’t said anything, but he bites his tongue nevertheless. He can feel his heart beating a little too fast, a small fluttering in his chest. He studies the back of Sam’s neck, the curls of hair there and the line of tan visible just under his shirt collar. _Let this one work._

The witch moves her cigarette from one corner of her mouth to another with her tongue and starts pouring the wax. It solidifies as soon as it touches the cold water, makes an uneven pool that freezes instantly, with air bubbles breaking through the surface and freezing half-torn. When all the wax is poured, Maria Petrovna nods, seemingly satisfied, and grabs Dean’s shoulder again to climb down. 

“That’s it?” he says.

She sets her pot aside and gestures for the water bowl. “Give here.” 

The island of frozen wax, relatively smooth on the surface, has formed bizarre whorls and figures on its underside. The witch pulls it out and blows on it to shake off water droplets. She ignores Sam and Dean as they move closer to look. Squinting at the shapes, she turns the piece of wax in her hands to try out different angles. The most obvious figure in the center of the whole strange sculpture is a twisted cone, wide at the surface of the island and tapering to a pointy end. Its body is twisted on itself, too, and it looks like a gnarled dead tree stripped of branches. There are more incomprehensible shapes around it that Dean would’ve dismissed, except that when Maria Petrovna turns the piece of wax just so, one formation resolves into a face. 

“Is that a face?” Sam says.

The witch pokes at it thoughtfully. It’s not so much a face as the contours of one, a vague impression twisted with some emotion – anger or pain or sadness – but the more Dean looks at it the more convinced he becomes. 

“You asked,” says Maria Petrovna. “You asked what’s in you. This.” She shakes the pieces of wax before Sam’s nose. “To a woman, I say she’s pregnant. You.” She takes a puff, exhales, fans the smoke around herself again, dropping gray ashes on Sam’s shoulder. “I say, devil. Or ghost.” 

“No, no, no.” Dean shakes his head. “No devils. He can’t be possessed, he has protection and he doesn’t act like it anyway.” It comes out smoothly, but he feels that her words have snagged something inside of him, some hope or nasty suspicion. 

Sam says, “Stop talking for me.”

Dean turns to look at him and so does the witch. Sam just smiles at them both, insincere all the way through. “So a devil, or a ghost,” he says. “What’s with the tree?” 

Maria Petrovna erupts in rumbling laughter, blowing puffs of smoke out of her nostrils like a she-dragon. “You’re younger brother. I know.” She hiccups the remainder of her laughter. It softened her face a little, showed crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes that made her appear more like someone’s grandmother. “Okay, okay. This is not a tree. Trees look different. I don’t know this one.” She hands the wax sculpture to Dean and wipes her hands on her skirt. “Maybe artery twisted, or intestine.” She glances between them and explains, “My son is a doctor. He tells me these things, sends me people sometimes.” 

“Twisted intestines?” Dean says, just as Sam says, “Wouldn’t that hurt?” 

The witch shrugs, collects her pans and walks back into the small kitchen, leaving the piece of wax in Dean’s hands. “How should I know?” she says over her shoulder. “Go to church, okay? Devils don’t like it in church.” 

Dean meets Sam’s eyes. The wax not-quite-a-tree in his hands looks mean, twisted round and round on itself and somehow worrisome. He should be worried about the face, he thinks, but it’s the tree that bothers him. 

“Can a demon be inside of someone and not be able to take over?” Sam says in a low voice. 

“Never heard of it.”

“By the way,” calls Maria Petrovna from the kitchen. “I cure from incest, too. I have a spell. You like?” 

 

**TORNADO WARNING**

When Danny wakes up, it’s with a desperate feeling of loss that almost chokes him with its intensity. He sits up, ready to run somewhere, ready to go reclaim it, whatever it is, but he can’t remember where he left his gun. Then it comes back to him that he doesn’t have a gun. He’d better not have a gun, or he’ll end up back in San Quentin. 

Danny takes a deep breath in through his nose and tries to dig through the dump that his memory has become for whatever it is that he lost. It felt so important when it buzzed through his head in that one moment. It’s one hell of a task to recall what you lost when you can’t even remember what you had in the first place and where you got the things you carry around. The clothes he finds scattered around the floor – check. The truck is probably still in the driveway, along with the box of canned tuna and those beans. Danny doesn’t think he’d be terribly avert to losing the latter two, but okay, check. The brother?

Danny huffs out a breath, feeling a pang of _something_ in his stomach. He rests his arms on his bent knees and lets his head drop for a moment. Nothing. Could it be that his brother died in that goddamn accident? _No._

A missing brother is a pretty good reason to get out of bed on any given morning. 

The room he’s in seems smaller in the daylight than it did last night when he got here. Then again, Danny thinks, rubbing at his temples to try and chase away sleepy confusion, then again, he wasn’t all that sober or all that interested in the interior. It’s a simple room – four walls and a low bed, a wardrobe, a gun safe and a night table with some change on it. From where he’s sitting, Danny can see pine trees behind the window in the distance, which gives him pause. He didn’t think there were any pines in this part of the state. 

Downstairs, a man’s voice has been singing the first verse of “Black Betty” on repeat ever since Danny woke up, with variations in the depth of an expertly faked southern accent. Danny finds that it doesn’t bother him one bit. 

There’s a warm, appreciative buzz in his muscles and under his skin when he moves to sit on the edge of the bed. Danny gently presses two fingers into his shoulder, into what feels like a small bruise, and smiles to himself. Yeah, perhaps the chili and beer went a little too far last night, but he isn’t one to complain. The chili was good, the sex was better. Danny can’t remember the last time he’s had either, which isn’t saying much, of course. 

His underwear and belt are nowhere to be found and “Black Betty” is starting to get old, so Danny gives up the search, pulls up his jeans over his bare ass and winces when they sit lower than he likes. How does anybody manage to lose weight right after prison? He puts on a shirt and wanders out into the hallway.

By the look of the house, the sheriff isn’t the first owner and hasn’t spent much time making it his. Danny drags the tips of his fingers along the wallpaper faded with time. There’s a smudged line below, as if a child a lot smaller than Danny used to do the same thing at some point, probably every time he or she passed through this hallway. He wonders if it was the sheriff – Al – if he grew up here. Danny looks into another room on his way to the stairs and sees that the windows are boarded up. The room doesn’t appear to be inhabitable. He finds the bathroom behind another door, and that one at least looks like the shower was used recently. Danny washes his face in the sink and smears some toothpaste over his teeth with his finger. By the time he shuts off the water, the singing downstairs has stopped.

Danny follows his nose to the kitchen on the ground floor, drawn by the smell of bacon and waffles. The sheriff is waiting by the counter when he comes in, looking cautious. “Are you gonna go Drew Barrymore on me?” he says after a minute of mutual silent staring.

Danny cracks a smile. “No. I don’t have any problems with new memories.” And then, because he has to, “You watched that movie?” 

“It was on.” The sheriff shrugs. He looks Danny up and down, pausing at the hips and at the base of his neck where the skin shows. Danny sets his shoulders a little straighter, regretting not leaving his shirt upstairs. He enjoys being looked at this way. 

“I called John,” the sheriff says. “I told him I was letting you sleep in the holding cell since the weather is complete shit. There’s a tornado warning in effect two counties over. He agreed it would be a bad idea for you to sleep outside of town in your truck. You got a day off.” 

“Wouldn’t one of your deputies mention to him that I wasn’t in the holding cell?”

“He won’t ask.”

Danny takes a step forward and catches the sheriff’s face between his palms to draw him into a kiss. It’s deep and dirty and it tastes like coffee, and it’s better than a kiss has any right to be. The sheriff – Danny can’t bring himself to call him “Al” and wouldn’t be able to say why – drags them close together, catching the waist of Danny’s jeans, until they’re chest to chest. He puts a hand on the back of Danny’s skull and makes the kiss last. They separate but stay pressed to each other for no good reason, breathing against each other’s lips, in a tangle of limbs, with Danny’s hands still on the sheriff’s face and the sheriff’s hand still cradling Danny’s head. 

“Okay,” the sheriff says, quietly. He presses another small kiss against Danny’s mouth and takes a step back. “Okay, later.” 

Danny backs off as well, finds an empty mug on the counter and goes for the coffee machine. There’s an electric bill on the table that catches his eye when he pulls out a chair to sit down. “Algernon Marsh?”

The sheriff snorts, pushing the bacon off the skillet and onto a plate. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“But _Algernon?_ ”

“I didn’t name myself, did I? It was my brother’s idea.” He puts a plate in front of Danny and sits down. The light outside is too dim, and Danny can’t really see that thin strip of pale skin on the bridge of his nose that draws him like a magnet. But, he thinks, they have time. They have the whole day to study each other’s bodies in the light.

What were they talking about? The word ‘brother’ comes back, out of context. Danny says the first thing that comes into his head. “You kinda look like my brother.” 

The sheriff lets out a disbelieving laugh and Danny realizes what he just said. “Wow,” the sheriff says. “Dude, you got some issues besides that memory thing.” 

“Fuck you.”

The sheriff wiggles his eyebrows. Danny gets a warm feeling in his lower belly under that stare.

“So.” The sheriff leans back in his chair. “Where’s that brother of yours?”

Danny sighs. He thought about that while brushing his teeth and came up empty. If his brother didn’t die in the accident, why wasn’t he trying to come into contact? Why wasn’t he looking? “Maybe he doesn’t know I’m out.” 

“Out?”

_Oh._ Danny shrugs uncomfortably, suddenly remembering that he never told the sheriff about his conviction. “I— I did a little time in California. Two years for reckless burning.” 

The sheriff chokes on his coffee. While he’s coughing, Danny eats his bacon – might as well, if he’s about to get kicked out. He really hopes he doesn’t. “I finished my sentence. I didn’t escape.” He doesn’t think so, at least. “Look at it this way: if you were worried about your public image, sleeping with a man in the first place was probably a bad idea.” 

“Yeah, well.” It comes out a little squeaky, and the sheriff clears his throat. “You have a point. And I guess I’m not really sorry.” 

“I’ll make it up to you.”

“Damn right, you will.” 

Danny rolls his eyes. The table is small enough and his legs are long enough to reach to the seat of Al’s chair. He rests one foot there as a promise, between the sheriff’s spread legs. 

“Reckless burning, huh?” There’s a question at the end of the phrase, and Danny shrugs.

“I don’t remember.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

They fall silent while the sheriff chews his waffle with an expression like he’s considering something very important. He looks younger this morning, less serious out of his uniform, less focused. Danny has long forgiven him the aviators, the cowboy stride, and the joking. He inches his foot forward until his toes are touching the sheriff’s dick through his jeans. The sheriff turns his eyes on him and keeps looking until it tips over into a staring contest. Danny slides his foot forward a bit more, under the sheriff’s balls and counts it as a victory when his eyes slide closed for a moment as he rolls his hips against Danny’s toes. 

“Hey, what was your father’s name?” Al says suddenly.

He must have had a father, at some point. He must have had a mother, too. He might have sprung out of a test tube just as well, for all he remembers.

“When did the Vietnam War end?”

Danny rubs his toes between the sheriff’s legs, presses up not enough to hurt but just enough to really be felt. He slides his foot up and over the zipper. 

“What comes after Monday?”

“You realize how close my foot is to your junk?”

The sheriff reaches under the table to stroke Danny’s ankle, running his thumb in the groove along the tendon. “Yeah, I noticed. Really, I hope you went to see a doctor for that head problem of yours.” 

Danny gets up and walks around the table to kneel between his legs. The sheriff puts a hand on the back of his head and runs his fingers through Danny’s hair just rough enough and exactly right. It’s this thing between them again, something they both apparently feel but haven’t given voice to – the need to mark, to bruise, to hold on tight, to be felt. Danny pushes back against the sheriff’s hand as he pulls the zipper down, savors the contact and refuses to think about anything at all – of brothers, of fathers, of Tuesdays, of tornadoes. 

 

**NOLI ME TANGERE**

“Dean,” Sam says quietly. “Can you hear me?”

John Winchester had a belt, years and years ago, before it got fucked up with blood and had to be thrown away along with all the other evidence from that one hunt. It was an admirable piece of leather – broad and stiff, made to serve a man for years – and a lot more expensive than John would’ve paid for back then. The belt was a gift from a Texan ranger whose breeding stock John saved from a chupacabra. Sam remembers every little detail about it.

There was one night when Sam was six and Dean was ten, and they got a ride back to the motel in a police cruiser for making oxyacetylene bombs out of beach balls. They were both going to get their asses handed back to them and they knew it. While John talked to the cops, Sam watched them from where he was crouched behind a bed. He had never felt like that before, like his blood was fizzing and his bones were singing and his head was up in the clouds. Fiery explosions might have had something to do with that. He eyed the belt in the loops of John’s jeans, and for the first time he wasn’t afraid of what was to come. Did he really have to cry every time? He thought that maybe he always cried because his brother always did, because it hurt and because he was scared, but when separated from “Dean” and “scared”, the burning and stinging that the belt was going to inflict on his backside weren’t all that bad. Sam thought, perhaps he could handle it. John was trying to make a point, not inflict pain, but Sam didn’t know it then. He felt brave. 

“Dean. You asleep?”

Now, alone in the dark room with his sleeping brother, Sam keeps thinking about that night. Dean is passed out cold and not due to wake up until noon, if Sam knows anything about him. He has a sleeping pattern. When Dean is hunting or is under a lot of stress, he will cycle through periods of fierce alertness, sleeping four to five hours every other night. Then, after about seven days, he will crash and be dead to the world for the next sixteen hours. Sam counted.

Sprawled out on his back, with one arm thrown over his head and one leg bent at an uncomfortable-looking angle, Dean sleeps on. His chest rises and falls in a slow hypnotic motion. The room is quiet and only illuminated by the flickering vacancy sign in the parking lot that reflects off the face of the clock and the water glass from which Dean drank before falling asleep. The beds are pushed close in this joint, and Sam only needs to reach out to touch him. He doesn’t do it. One of them – Sam doesn’t remember who – has left the witch’s piece of wax on the bedside table, with its twisted spike pointing at the ceiling and the twisted face hidden in shadows. Sam reaches out to run his fingers over the waxy impression of the face. 

There’s an odd feeling in him.

“Dean. Remember when we made those beach ball bombs and Dad kicked our asses? I didn’t cry then, but you did.” Dean sighs in his sleep, and Sam drops his voice even lower. “I was younger than you, and I realized first that the physical pain alone wasn’t bad enough. I didn’t have to cry, so I didn’t.” He can see Dean now the way he was then – a skinny little boy with his face streaked with tears, lingering behind the motel. Sam went – well, hobbled – to find him there, and he still remembers the look of surprise he got for his own clean face. Neither of them ever cried again because of the belt. 

Sam’s bag is packed and waiting at the foot of his bed. He picks up the piece of wax and touches the weird shapes carefully, trying not to break them. With the shadows falling on it just the right way, the wax face seems to come alive. It doesn’t even look like much of a face, but Sam knew it the moment he saw it. 

“I don’t want this soul in me,” he tells Dean. “But I know you do. It’s been great seeing you again.”

The feeling brewing inside of him is like pain. That’s probably what made that leather belt come to mind. There are different aspects to pain, different shapes and dimensions, and while some are tolerable and others are enjoyable, there are some that will make a man cry. Nothing hurts, and Sam is fine. There’s just this odd feeling, little physiological hiccups that used to accompany a swooping emotion that has since been disconnected. 

Sam leaves the wax figure on the table and stands up to lean over Dean. In recognition of something old, he kisses his brother’s forehead before walking out the door.

~~~~

Dean dreams that he wants to know the time, and whenever he looks at his watch the readings vary wildly. It’s making him a little pissed in that muffled way people get pissed in their dreams. He gives up and falls into oblivion. He dreams that it’s started raining. He dreams that an old friend came to visit. Castiel sits on the edge of his bed with his head bent low, and the shadows of rain running down the window make their ghostly progress down the back of his trench coat. 

“Hey,” Dean says. 

Castiel half-turns his head to look at him. Deep shadows have gathered around his eyes. “There once was a man whose nose ran away from him,” he says. Even for a dream, it’s a pretty weird thing to say. 

“What?”

“Those are the words you’ve been trying to remember.” Castiel sighs. “It was a story you read in the Macon County Library when you were a child.”

“Don’t read my thoughts. You’ll pick up bad things.”

“I wasn’t reading your thoughts,” Castiel says. His figure keeps coming in and out of focus. “Your lips were moving.”

Dean closes his eyes for a moment, feeling like there’s a hundred pounds worth of pillows piled over him. When he opens them again, the shadows of Castiel’s wings quiver on the wall along with the faulty light; they look like they’re sagging.

“What’re you so bummed about?” 

Castiel shrinks even more on himself. Now Dean can barely see the top of his head hung between his shoulders. “I let myself be overtaken by pride. I raised you from Hell once. I thought, what’s another human soul for a— special,” he spits out the word, and Dean dreams that it falls from his lips as a small beetle, “angel like myself.”

“I’m not in Hell.” Dean thinks it’s a reasonable objection. Probably. 

“No. But Sam was, and I thought I could bring him back the right way. I didn’t read the manual.”

“Manual schmanual,” Dean says, intelligently. He lets his eyes slide all the way closed and falls into deep sleep again. 

 

**TORNADO WARNING**

“I’ll open the store today,” John says from the doorway, before Danny can take two steps away from his truck. “I need you to run a delivery for me.” 

Danny hides the keys in his pocket and follows John inside. The main room is dark when they walk through it, with the weak gray daylight barely touching the corners. Everything looks dead and quiet, with the meat in refrigerated display cases still covered up, even though it’s past opening time. Danny wonders when John is planning to open the store today, if he’s planning to open it at all. Watching John’s back in front of him, Danny now notices how careful he moves, as if sore. He also seems to be wearing yesterday’s clothes, wrinkled and marked with dark sweat stains.

Danny gives a little cough. “Sir?”

“Over here.” John walks into the back room and holds open the heavy freezer door for Danny. “I need you to make a delivery to Sheriff Marsh’s place. I’ll write down the address for you. It’s just outside of town.”

Danny smiles politely and doesn’t mention that he knows exactly where the sheriff lives, having slept there four nights in the past week alone. He waits for John to finish writing down the address and takes the paper from him, folding it and hiding it in his back pocket. 

“Look for Singer’s Salvage Yard,” John says. “It’s not that anymore but the sign is still there. Big place, you can’t miss it.” 

“Got it.”

“Help me with this.”

By the look of it, the package sitting on the floor could easily hold half a cow. It’s thick brown paper, but when Danny touches it, it rustles like there’s plastic lining on the inside. The whole thing is probably longer than him when laid out flat.

“Wow,” he says. “That’s a lot of meat.”

John squats to pick up one end of the package. “The man loves his chili.” 

_It really is half a cow._ The package is bulky, with the weight unevenly distributed, and it’s a pain in the ass to carry. Danny holds one end to his chest and backs out of the fridge while John carries the other end. They shuffle through the main room again in small awkward steps, not speaking but huffing and snorting. Danny can feel something cylindrical, probably a limb, pressing against his forearm as he holds the package. He walks carefully backward down the three steps leading from the store into the parking lot. They heave the package into the back of Danny’s truck and both stand back for a minute to catch their breath. 

“What’s he gonna do with all this?”

John shrugs, massaging his lower back. “He’s a paying customer. It’s his business, and you don’t stick your nose in it.”

Danny eyes the package. Some of the plastic lining must’ve torn while they were carrying it, because one corner is starting to slowly saturate with dark blood. 

“Alright,” John says. “Hurry back when you’re done. Watch out for the tornado.”

_Watch out for the tornado,_ Danny repeats to himself slowly as he climbs behind the wheel of the truck and turns the key in the ignition. The engine strains a little but it starts, and only when it’s rumbling does Danny notice how quiet the town is. _Watch out for the tornado,_ he thinks as he drives the truck out of the store’s tiny parking lot and onto an empty street. What a weird thing to say to somebody. What a weird place to live in, where one needs to say things like that. He checks the skies for forming funnels but only sees clouds rolling very fast. The air is hot and still, with a weak breeze that makes wind chimes whisper all over town.

Danny glances in the rearview mirror to watch John head back inside the store. He hasn’t flipped the “Closed” sign or turned the lights on.

It’s been two weeks since he started at Winchester Meat, and Danny’s first paycheck is sitting in the inside pocket of his jacket, not yet cashed but finally his to spend. He touches it surreptitiously, just to make sure. Danny glances down side streets as he drives and wonders if he should perhaps explore the town sometime soon, maybe look for – _an abandoned ruin to squat in_ – a room for rent. The town looks empty, like a stage set for some disaster that everyone but Danny knows is coming. _Watch out for the tornado._

“Not bad, Broflovski,” he tells himself aloud, just to chase away the silence. He’s been imagining a rustling of plastic in the truck’s bed underneath the rumbling of the truck’s old engine. “Got a paying job, got a—” He stumbles, not exactly sure what to call the sheriff. Algernon. Al. He thinks of the nights spent in another man’s bed, and of closeness. “Got a friend.”

Plastic rustles in the back again. Danny ignores it. 

The memory thing isn’t any better, and Danny still hasn’t gotten anywhere when it comes to his missing brother. He turned the truck inside out trying to figure out who it belonged to, where he got it from, whether he stole it, whether he should climb into an even deeper hole than this town in Texas to escape the law. He tried to find any letters or postcards to tell him that someone is looking for him out there. He came up empty. There was a whole lot of unremarkable junk but nothing that would tell him where his only family is or what it is that he lost that keeps plaguing his dreams. Danny isn’t so sure anymore that his memory is ever coming back.

The sheriff’s place is twenty minutes out of town, and by the time Danny gets there,  
the wind has picked up considerably. It blows the car door back at him when he tries to get out. Pulling his jacket tighter around his shoulders, Danny walks around to the truck’s bed just in time to see the meat package move. 

Danny jerks back and almost falls on his ass. The package twitches again, more noticeable this time, and the movement produces that same noise of rustling plastic. The blood seeping through the torn corner has spread to at least three times the original size and made a small pool in the truck bed. 

“Oh god,” Danny mumbles. 

Whatever it is inside – how did it not suffocate? It has to be an injured animal, and Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with John? Danny pulls out the knife he’s started carrying, mentally kisses his paycheck goodbye, and climbs up and into the truck. The animal in the package lurches again, having heard the movement.

“Easy, easy. Gonna get you out.” 

The paper sack has been sewn closed. Danny probes at one end of it to make sure there’s no flesh underneath and pushes the knife in. More blood comes pouring out as the blade punctures through the plastic lining. It stains Danny’s fingers and fills the air with the smell of copper. The animal kicks stronger, and Danny extends the cut as much as he can while trying not to hurt whatever’s inside. It doesn’t smell like the butcher shop – not like drained meat but like so much fresh blood, and it makes Danny’s head spin, all this blood that leaks out and soaks into his jeans. 

He started at the leg end, he realizes as soon as he sees the hooves. And just as one of the legs kicks out at him, dangerously close to his head, causing him to jerk backward, just then Danny sees the human knees, one of which is swollen to twice the normal size. 

“Sammy, get down!” 

He ducks down instinctively, away from the monster ripping its way out of the bag, and flattens himself against the bed of the truck. A rifle shot sounds like the world cracking, and Danny presses his palms over his ears and tries to fuse with the floor. He feels the hooves bang against it, and then comes another shot that makes his teeth rattle. After that, everything’s quiet. 

His skull feels like it’s vibrating. _Watch out for the tornado,_ he thinks, for no reason. And then, _Sammy._

He lifts his head and looks at the sheriff, standing there with a Winchester rifle like a snapshot from an old Western. Danny glances over his own shoulder. There, halfway out of the bag, is the bullheaded man from the butcher shop, only covered in blood that oozes from several gunshot wounds. Danny counts five – three in the chest, probably John’s work, and two in the head. The sight of the monster is almost obscene in the daylight, exposed down to the last coarse hair, to the scratches on the hooves. 

“You okay?” Al says.

_Sammy._ It’s an empty name, just another name, nothing special about it. Sam, Bob, Frank, whatever. Sammy, if one wants to add an extra layer of affection. Danny pushes himself up and climbs out of the truck to stand next to the sheriff. He can feel eyes on him but doesn’t turn his head, careful of his privacy. Whatever thoughts might be showing in his eyes, he wants to keep them for now. 

Still, something needs to be said. “I’m okay.”

The sheriff climbs up into the truck. He stands over the dead monster, waiting, then pokes him with the rifle. There’s no reaction. 

“I’ll bite,” Danny says. “What was that?” 

The sheriff shoots him an indecipherable look. “Don’t you recognize it?”

“Oh, I recognize it.”

“Well then.” He shrugs and bends down to tug what’s left of the bag over the corpse. “Just a bad thing.”

Danny crosses his arms and waits for more but the sheriff doesn’t offer anything and instead occupies himself with checking for damage to the truck. “A bad thing? That’s your answer? I don’t fucking believe you! I thought this thing was my hallucination, I thought I hit my head too hard.”

“Stop thinking about your head so much. Every time something doesn’t make sense to you, I swear, you blame it on that injury. Maybe that’s why you can’t remember shit.”

Danny takes in a slow breath, holds it, lets it out, feels a tiny part of his anger leave with it. “A bad thing?”

The sheriff jumps down from the truck. “Yeah, Danny, a bad thing. What do you want from me? They aren’t supposed to exist but they do. John and I, we take care of them when they show up.”

“Monsters, you mean.”

The sheriff nods, looking suddenly tired. From up close, Danny can see dark circles under his eyes. The sheriff grabs one end of the ruined bag and pulls the dead monster toward himself. He swears when his hand slips on the blood but doesn’t ask for help, so Danny steps forward to grab the other end. 

“To the backyard,” Al says. He takes the monster’s knees and pulls it out of the truck. Danny has no choice but to catch the thing’s shoulders, and the dead weight of its head drops against his chest. Danny pokes at his own feelings as the two of them shuffle around the house to the former scrapyard with a dead body between them. Oddly, instead of horror, he only finds mild disgust within himself, like if he stuck his hand into a pile of fish guts. Gross, but nothing to lose your breakfast over or have nightmares about.

_Sammy._ He hides that precious little thought away. 

**NOLI ME TANGERE**

The door opens by a few inches, showing a blue eye and a segment of a face. “Yes?”

“Maria Petrovna? Remember me?” 

There is a steely calm feeling in Dean, a familiar resolution of an ongoing hunt. It’s a curious state of being psychologically and physically halfway into a fight before it starts, when every detail stands out in sharp contrast. The witch must sense something because she eyes him mistrustfully. Dean forces a smile.

“I was hoping you could help me with your reading from yesterday,” he says. He shows her a few folded twenties. “I’ll pay for your trouble, of course.”

She spares the money one glance and studies his face again. Dean fixes his smile and holds it. He can feel a leg muscle twitching.

“It’s late,” she says. “Come back tomorrow.” She starts closing the door.

Dean sees the open space shrinking, the face receding into the nicotine-stained apartment, further and further, and it feels like it’s cutting off his lifeline. He puts one hand on the door then and pushes. The witch gasps on the other side, the single visible eye going wide, and throws her body against the door on the inside. Dean catches the door with his shoulder before it closes, presses in. The moment of struggle feels suspended when there is no significant budge in either direction, and then it gives and gives some more toward the inside. Dean can hear heavy, fast breathing from the apartment. He feels the balance tip in his favor and throws a hard punch against the door. It flies open and throws the witch backwards. Dean registers peripherally the crash of the doorknob against the wall and mentally winces, but there’s no slowing down. He sees the woman’s white face and her eyes gone huge as she leans out of balance, a moment before she goes down with a thunderous crash. Dean feels like it’s him who’s falling, an irreversible motion forward. He drops to his knees next to the witch, grabs a handful of beet-colored hair and pulls her head up.

“You. Are gonna help me find. My brother. Right the fuck now.” 

There’s a thundering in his chest and in his ears. These things register distantly, like the way her face has twisted in pain and the way his fingers are clasped like steel in her hair, unshaken. _Jesus Christ, Winchester, what are you doing? She’s an old woman._

“Okay, okay!” she stutters. “Yes, okay!”

Dean lets go of her hair, crawls back until he’s off her. There’s a small sick knot in his stomach. The witch lies there moaning. He offers a hand but she’s either too weak or her legs have gone numb. _Or she’s broken something, you asshole._

“Okay, here, careful.” He braces his legs and picks her up under her shoulders, pushes her up. She’s trembling against his hands – debilitating, large tremors that pass through her body in waves and probably drain away her strength. Dean holds her by the waist, lets her weight rest on him as she slowly gets her legs under her again. 

Dean doesn’t look at her when he closes the door or when he walks to the shawl-draped table to move the chair for her. It’s such an idiotic gesture of chivalry that it makes his face burn, but there’s no taking anything back. Her evening tea is on the table in a tacky cup, along with a piece of cake with a bite taken out and a mystery novel. Dean can’t read the title in foreign letters but recognizes the content anyway by the cover image of a gun, blood spatter and a terrified-looking blonde. He is profoundly sorry for having introduced real violence into her life, and he can never put it into words. 

“Please,” he says instead. “Sit down.”

The witch hesitates in the narrow mouth of her hallway before she moves to the table and sits down. Dean hears a small gasp from her. He walks around and stands opposite her.

“Look, I’m not gonna hurt you,” he says. “It’s just that my brother—” She has her head bent low and she looks up at him through the tangle of hair. Dean can suddenly sense the echo of a feeling in the palm of his hand – her meaty scalp and brittle old woman hair. “Listen. My brother is gone. I need to know what this is.” 

Her eyes dart down to the piece of wax Dean puts on the table between them, underside up, with the twisted column pointing at the ceiling. From where he’s standing, Dean can see a swelling beginning to settle on her forehead where the door hit her. “Maria Petrovna—”

She waves him off and doesn’t look at him. She picks up the wax figure from the tabletop, twists it in front of her face this way and that, wincing. “Most important,” she says, “are the face and this thing.” The witch pokes at the column and breaks it off, setting it aside from the rest of the figure. Out of a drawer comes a deck of simple playing cards which she begins to shuffle. She still won’t look at Dean. 

“I know what the face is. Tell me about the twisty thing.”

“Give me time.”

“Okay.”

She looks up then. Her eyes are watering but there’s black anger in them. “Stand over there. You make me sick, ruin the reading.” 

Dean backs away from the table. Under his shirt, the butt of a gun is digging into his waist. He wouldn’t have pulled it on a scared old woman, witch or not. Of course he wouldn’t. Dean crosses his arms and walks around the living room pretending to look at the photos and staying away from the table. The pictures are all of grim adults and of equally grim children. There is one of a woman with large arms who looks like a younger Maria Petrovna sitting next to a man in a foreign sailor’s uniform. They look so much alike, and Dean stares at the photo for the longest time, feeling a little sick. 

When Dean woke up that morning, it was with a memory of the odd dream in which Castiel babbled about some manuals and renegade body parts. _There once was a man whose nose ran away from him._ It was a part of some old story, and Dean has forgotten most of it except that the man’s nose escaped one night, pretended to be human, and got into politics. The memory has been nagging him for weeks, a clear sign that his subconscious smelled rat before the rest of him, and dammit, he should’ve paid more attention. When he woke up in an empty room, it all made sense – the story, Cas’s manual and the face in the wax. The soul, Dean understood, was back but somehow misplaced, and Sam ran away with it. It wasn’t just the nose – Sam’s entire body has taken off in a stolen Honda, along with a solid piece of Dean’s sanity and his chance of getting his brother back. 

“It’s some kind of devil.”

Dean turns around. Maria Petrovna gathers her cards in a pile and starts shuffling. She has pushed her crime novel to the far end of the table. It’ll probably be a while before she dabbles in the genre again. 

“Can’t be a demon,” he says. “Sam is protected against possession.” 

She shrugs, irritated. “What do I know? I’m just old woman.” 

Dean comes back to the table and sits opposite her. “You sure?” he says. “Why is it shaped like a tree?”

“Told you, not a tree. Trees look different.” She folds her hands on her stomach and sits there stiffly, waiting. 

Dean picks up the cone from the table and turns it this way and that. It doesn’t look like a demon. If anything, it looks like Hexus’s tree from _Ferngully,_ an ugly misshapen thing. It could be a horn. He turns it upside down, with the pointy end down, and now it looks like a crooked ice cream cone. 

“Go,” the witch says. “You get out.” 

“Not yet.” They stare at each other for a long moment across the table. “Listen, I have to find my brother. You gotta give me something more.” 

Maria Petrovna holds his gaze for another minute, silent as though she’s waiting for him to back away. Dean stares back. He thinks briefly about the gun and squashes that thought as soon as it appears. The witch suddenly snarls and pushes the tea cup at him, dowsing his leg, but it’s more an act of anger than anything else. Out of her instrument drawer she pulls a ceramic circle with letters written along the edge and slams it down on the table. In the center of the circle she sets the tip of a needle with a string threaded through the eye, which she holds up at an angle, so that only the very tip is touching down. She hunches her shoulders over the apparatus and starts mumbling to herself, as if Dean would disappear if she just refuses to look at him long enough.

Dean walks into the kitchen. There’s a bag of frozen vegetables in the freezer which he pulls out and leaves on the table next to the witch’s elbow – a home-made ice pack. She ignores him, preoccupied with her swinging needle. 

“Danny Broflovski,” she says after a minute. She pronounces “Broflovski” in a strange manner, with phonemes that probably belong in the original but are missing in the English version.

Dean blinks. “What?”

“That’s a name. Look for Danny Broflovski.”

“Like in _South Park_?”

She stands up and waves her massive hands at him like she’s shooing an animal. “Get out. You get out now. I call police.” 

Dean triple checks that he didn’t forget anything behind before he leaves the apartment with his pieces of wax. Can’t leave personal things and DNA for witches to find. The old woman follows him to the door. How does one apologize for these things?

“Thank you,” he says when he’s on the landing.

She slams the door. 

 

**TORNADO WARNING**

The twelve inch chef’s knife is sharp as a razor, heavy and perfectly balanced. Danny weights it in his hand and lifts it to his eyelevel to watch the dull shine of steel in the artificial light. Such a beautiful piece of equipment. It’s clearly designed for a kitchen, not well suited for combat, and still the heavy feel of it in his palm and the sharpness of it give Danny a little buzz. It’s impractical. It has no scabbard. But goddamn if it wouldn’t feel like electricity in his veins to have a piece of steel in his hand and to carve something he’s lost and forgotten out of some bad thing’s flesh. 

His mind made, Danny wraps the blade in a towel and hides it inside his jacket. He can return it in the morning when he opens the shop.

Upstairs, John won’t go to sleep. Danny’s eyes keep flicking up as footsteps pass back and forth on the floor above. It’s the same shuffling sound of bare feet dragging along the floorboards. Back and forth, back and forth again. Danny fixes the spot with his eyes where the footsteps pause in the southeast corner, tries to guess what John might be doing there. The man upstairs suddenly breaks into a run, thunders over Danny’s head and, by the sound of it, crushes into the opposite wall. 

_It’s got to be true what they say about a full moon drawing out the weird._

There’s an oppressive feeling in the air when Danny steps outside that makes him think of a storm about to break out. The smell of wild grasses tingles in his nostrils, mixed with the ever-present aroma of a meat shop that has been following Danny everywhere. He stands on the steps and breathes in the thick air, the smell of summer night all around him. When he looks up, the lights upstairs are off and Danny thinks, _God, John, what are you doing up there by yourself in the dark?_ Hunching his shoulders, feeling the towel-wrapped knife bump gently against his ribs with every step, he walks around the house and sits on the curb to wait. 

The patrol car draws up just after midnight, and Danny gets in the passenger seat. “What,” he says to the sheriff who grins at him from behind the wheel, “no aviators at night?”

“You’re just jealous.” 

The sheriff leans over the steering wheel and waves in the direction of the store. John Winchester gives him thumbs up from the first floor window before he lets the curtains drop and the entire shop goes black. “My turn to patrol,” the sheriff explains, turning to Danny. “He’s glad you’re tagging along. The monsters have been going completely batshit lately. John and I aren’t getting any sleep.” He stares at the moon through the windshield, pushing his lips together in that displeased grimace that Danny’s noticed him make from time to time. “It’s gotta be the fucking tornado.” 

“ _The_ fucking tornado?” Danny repeats. “Just one?” 

“Yeah, well.” The sheriff shrugs and gets the car rolling, away from the shop and into the empty streets, accelerating to a steady forty miles per hour. Danny waits for his answer. The corner of Al’s mouth creeps upward and he puts on an exaggerated Texan accent. “What you gotta remember first and foremost, sonny, is to watch out for the tornado. You see it forming – you run like hell and take cover, got it?” 

“I’ve seen one before, you know.”

“Not like this.”

The town looks sleepy in the headlights of the patrol car, all empty yards and a few lit windows, the linens hanging dead still off some lines without a stir of wind. Danny watches the houses fly by, with more and more space between them as the sheriff takes them outside the town’s limits. He remembers, out of the blue, going to sleep in tornado weather, when he was little and lived in Michigan. His old homemade prayer comes back to him then, and Danny mumbles before he realizes it, “Oh God, don’t let me wake up in Kansas.” 

“What?” 

“It’s an old anti-tornado prayer,” Danny explains. “Don’t let me wake up in Kansas.” 

They drive in silence, with the radio playing softly as the town recedes in the rearview mirror and eventually becomes a small pool of quivering lights. Danny watches the moon running along with the car and to the west, with the clouds streaming fast across its face. He studies the dark spots on the moon’s surface, and the more he looks, the more the pattern appears meaningful, as if it will reveal something important if he just looks long and hard enough. Danny averts his eyes. This is how these things start, and the next thing you know, the writings in an elevator are secret messages left just for you. 

Except, the monsters are turning out to be real.

“Hey,” he says, just for distraction. “What’s John’s problem?”

The sheriff frowns. “In what sense?”

“He’s been acting weird.” Danny thinks of the dragging footsteps, of the pacing and running into walls and occasional moans he’s heard while working in the backroom. 

“Ah, that. It’s probably just his PTSD acting up. He’s a little messed up after Vietnam, but who could blame the guy?” He shrugs, turns down the radio. “Alright, listen, Sam. There’s a nest up ahead, which is where we’re going. One of the deputies spotted it during a routine traffic stop yesterday. There’re five or six of them inside, still small, but I don’t know where the parent is. So watch your ass.”

Danny takes a deeper breath to feel the press of the towel-wrapped knife against his ribs. “Okay. You have a gun for me?”

“Yeah.” The sheriff’s face is focused, determined. “Hey, I’m not kidding you about watching your ass. I could’ve taken this one out myself but I need backup. The parent might still be around, and the tornado…” He makes a disgusted noise, and Danny realizes suddenly that this is how he shows unease. “Don’t let it sneak up on us.” 

He pulls the car over four miles outside of town, on the side of an empty back road where Danny used to park his truck to sleep at night. The sheriff kills the engine and the lights, and for a moment, they’re in the dark. This is when Danny hears the sound. Rustle, scratch, rustle. More rustling, like sand running down a slope. Danny makes himself breathe slower before the booming of his heartbeat can block out the rest of the world. Slower, slower. There it comes again – rustling and a thin noise like the squeaking of a mouse. _No, a baby bird._

The sheriff clicks on a flashlight and passes it to Danny along with a handgun. “Loaded,” he says. “Follow me.”

“You hear that sound?”

The sheriff’s already two steps ahead, and when he turns around, Danny is momentarily shaken because Algernon Marsh looks the exact copy of Danny’s missing brother in the dark, with a ray of flashlight casting shadows on his face. His lips move, and it takes a moment for the words to register. “Yeah, it’s just up ahead. That’s what we’re here for.” 

Carefully, Danny follows. A small sweat stain is starting to show between the sheriff’s shoulders. There’s no time for Danny to be thinking about his hole-ridden memory or his brother but oh, he wants to. It’s so much better than the thought of five or six monsters just a few feet ahead. He pets the muzzle of the gun for confidence, checks the safety and pulls the slide back, hearing a bullet slide into the chamber, and then he feels a little better. 

The nest is hidden in a small depression in the ground, partially covered up with bushes. No wild animal would leave a nest unprotected on the ground like this, but obviously, these chicks don’t need much protection. When Danny stands next to the sheriff over the nest and shines his flashlight down by their feet, the sight almost makes him recoil. There’re five of the things, each one of them the size of a chihuahua, in a nest layered with feathers and grasses and what looks like socks stolen from a clothes line in town. When the light beam falls on them, the things squirm away, hissing, and Danny stares down one’s open raptor’s beak past the triangular tongue and down its red throat. 

“Ugly little shits, aren’t they?” says the sheriff next to him.

The chicks’ hairless skin is almost transparent, and the organs are dark shadows against the walls of their bellies. The sheriff swipes the light over the nest, and they hiss louder and raise their tiny human hands to cover their black eyes against the flashlight. There’re old strips of flesh in the nest, probably the source of the hideous smell, and dried blood and a few animal teeth among split bones. The hissing, Danny thinks, sounds a little like words, like five inhuman throats trying to say, “Ice, ice, ice” – or perhaps, “Eyes, eyes, eyes.” 

As if through water, Danny hears himself say, “Disgusting.” And he shoots the one down whose throat he’s been looking. Its body explodes at the bullet’s impact, splashing the others with entrails. 

There is no way he would’ve wanted to get close enough to these to use the knife. Danny and the sheriff shoot the remaining ones and afterwards, kick sand into the nest to cover it up. They walk back to the patrol car in silence, and Danny wouldn’t have been able to tell anybody what it is he’s feeling. It’s like a low-frequency buzz inside his bones, perhaps something familiar about to come back to him. 

**NOLI ME TANGERE**

Dean almost flies off the freeway in Colorado. There’s a snow storm blowing across the state, and three cups of coffee don’t really cut it to compensate for summer tires and sleep deprivation. Mental images of the Impala as a flaming pile of twisted metal sit in his head the whole time he waits at a local motel for the teenage girl behind the counter to run his card. It’s close enough to Valentine’s Day that red hearts are everywhere, and Dean studies them while he waits. 

It took two days to figure out where he needed to go, two full days wasted screaming for Cas and calling Bobby obsessively. He couldn’t risk calling anybody else since he didn’t know who Sam has been in contact with and who could possibly alert him that Dean is on his tail. He ran through all his and Bobby’s contacts in search of Danny Broflovski – until it hit him on the morning of the third day. 

“Number thirteen,” the girl says, offering him the key. 

“Lucky.”

Dean couldn’t figure out right away why “Danny Broflovski” made him think of summer and cigarettes. Then it came back. It was July, ninety five degrees in Pennsylvania, and Sam’s hair kept sticking to his neck in little coils. Dean used to bring him Doritos and ice pops at the hospital and take smoke breaks in the back stairwell that had a nice breeze blowing through it. The concrete walls kept the place cool. Dean’s nicotine habit was escalating, which Sam bitched about. Sam had a collapsed lung from their last hunt, the chest tube was bothering him, he kept getting tuna sandwiches for dinner, couldn’t sleep at night and was constantly in a shitty mood. They used to hide on the top landing of that stairwell where there was a window to the outside and where nobody ever set foot because it meant too many stairs. Dean smoked, Sam ate his chips, and Sam’s portable suction machine kept going in the background like an airplane turbine. A hunt found them there, but that was later. 

The reason Danny Broflovski didn’t appear on anybody’s contact list was that he was no more than a name on Sam’s fake medical insurance card from some hunt that was years in the past. There was nothing distinct about that hunt either, except for the kiss. 

Bobby calls while Dean is brushing his teeth. “Hey, kid.”

“Hm!” Dean bends over the sink to rinse out his mouth before picking up the phone again. “Hey, Bobby.”

“Where are you?”

The blizzard is still going full force when Dean glances at the window. There’s a small bank of snow building up against the bottom of the glass. “Stuck in Colorado. I need some sleep.”

“You get some rest.” There’s a pause in which both of them think about how Sam doesn’t sleep and has a two day head start, but that goes unsaid. Bobby sighs. “So I checked out Pennsylvania, and you were right, there’s a hunt around Altoona. How do you know Sam’s there?”

“He’s a workaholic these days. He wouldn’t just run and hide when he might as well hunt.” 

Bobby is munching on something, Dean can tell over the line. He thinks about food, realizes that he’s hungry but can’t be bothered to go find something. He sits down on the edge of the bed to rifle through his bag where he thinks there might be a stray candy bar.

“Yeah,” Bobby says in that tone he uses when he is questioning Dean’s and Sam’s intellectual capacity. “And?”

“I figured, why does he hunt in the first place? He doesn’t have to. But he still does these things that used to be important to him and doesn’t question why. Remember how I asked you about Danny Broflovski?”

“I still can’t find out who that is.”

Dean closes his eyes and tries to rub an escalating headache out of his forehead. “It’s no one. It was Sam’s alias from a case we worked years ago near Pittsburg.” 

“You didn’t finish it or something?”

Dean eyes the pillow longingly. “No, we got it. But Sam goes for these things that were a big deal to him. It makes sense that he’d look in Pennsylvania if he wanted a hunt far away from me. I mean, it wouldn’t if the witch didn’t give me that name.”

There’s a silence on the line in which Bobby chews whatever it is that he’s having for dinner. “You lost me.” 

“Yeah, yeah. Listen. Bobby, I’m falling asleep here. I’ll explain later, okay?”

“Alright. You aim for Altoona.”

Dean disconnects the call and crawls into bed. In the sudden silence, he can hear someone taking a shower and someone else talking quietly behind the wall, and the wind howling like a real monster outside. There was nothing special about the monster in Pennsylvania. It was before they even found the monster. The thing is, Dean thinks, falling asleep, the thing is that there once was a man whose nose ran away from him. Only the nose ended up in the same line of work as the man, striving to be better, and probably went after the man’s girlfriend, too, who knows. What the nose didn’t realize is that it was driven by the man’s memories, ambitions, loves and desires. And if “Danny Broflovski” is the memory, then it’s Pennsylvania. 

In Dean’s dreams, the howling of wind outside becomes the sound of a suction machine. They’re on the top landing, sitting on concrete steps. Dean has a pair of aviators pushed up into his hair, and Sam hasn’t showered in two days. Just like that, like it’s nothing, Sam lays a hand on the back of Dean’s neck and kisses him full on the lips. It’s dry, close-mouthed, but Sam clearly means it. They’ve done this before and with a lot more saliva: they live and work by schemes and lies, and the key is to kiss your brother in the grossest way possible while still making it look genuine for any observer. There was no one on the landing with them that day, no reason to put on a show. Dean wondered about it for months and never, ever tried asking Sam. How does one give voice to such things?

 

**TORNADO WARNING**

Danny Broflovski has never been an inmate at the San Quentin prison. Nor has he ever been convicted of any crime at all in California.

The storm took down the power lines three hours ago. In the dark bedroom, Danny keeps a tight grip on the sheriff at all times, and there’s a pressure from the sheriff’s fingers on his shoulders and his thighs that tells him he’ll probably have bruises in the morning. Bruises are good. Danny hasn’t been feeling all that real lately.

Danny Broflovski has never received a driver’s license nor had a car registered in his name. There is no record of him ever having been born in Kansas.

With the sweat and heat between them, Danny feels grounded, tethered to this man and to his bed. The sheriff’s legs are intertwined with his and the sheriff’s mouth is moving along his neck and the sheriff’s hand is between his thighs. The sheriff would’ve been the exact copy of Unknown Broflovski, had Danny Broflovski ever had a sibling. For that matter, Sheriff Algernon Marsh has never been elected anywhere in Texas, but, Danny figures, two ghosts might make one real person with one solid body. 

“Say my name,” he says, and Al laughs in the dark, breathless. “Say it.”

“That memory problem of yours really is a bitch. Danny.”

Danny gets a handful of his hair, as much as he can catch between his fingers, and twists. There’s a short gasp, and Danny kisses Al’s mouth as an apology. “The other name.”

“What other name?”

Danny bites his lip and kisses it better. 

“Sam.”

_I am Sam. Sam I am._

The only thing Danny Broflovski had ever done in his questionable existence was get his sorry ass into a hospital. Out of the womb and into an adult acute care unit, bypassing the birth canal and everything else that comes in between. Danny spent three days there in July four years ago with a pneumothorax, until at one fifty three in the morning he pulled out his chest tube, shot his elderly neighbor three times in the head, and left in an unknown direction. That, however, did not stop the neighbor from rising from his bed twenty minutes later, and also disappearing along with the eyes of five other people which he plucked out. The eyes were later found inside a strange nest with some unidentified animal bones in a closed amusement park near Moon Township, Pennsylvania, where some expensive equipment had been trashed. Danny Broflovski left nothing behind but three .45 caliber casings from a Taurus handgun and a printout of some old story about a Sandman – a monster who plucks out kids’ eyes and takes them to his iron nest on the moon, to feed to his children. The local law enforcement had a blast with that one. Danny Broflovski is still wanted by the police in Pennsylvania, along with another man that used to visit him a lot in the hospital. First name Algernon, last name unknown. Oh, these things one can learn on the web!

The night is black, with every star and the moon obliterated by the clouds. Danny – _Sam_ – holds the other man’s face – _name unknown_ – between his hands so they won’t lose each other in the dark. 

_We must be ghosts,_ he thinks.

“I don’t know, man, you feel pretty real to me.”

Danny – Sam – laughs. “Did I say that out loud?”

“Yeah, you did.”

“Okay.” The sheriff’s hand is on his back, tracing little circles over his shoulder blade. Relaxed, Danny soaks in the sensation. “What’s your name?”

The sheriff snorts, and Danny – _Sam?_ – feels a tickle of warm breath on his cheekbone. “Algernon Marsh, courtesy of my kid brother.”

“How could your brother have named you if you were born before him?” 

“Well, check out the big brain on you.”

“What’s your ghost name?”

The sheriff is silent for a moment, and Danny tightens his grip on him to stop him from disappearing into thin air. A name is whispered in his ear. It rolls and rolls like a pebble all the way through his head, falls into a memory hole and makes no splash. But it will be back, he knows that for sure. 

“I think I’ve figured out what I lost.” Danny closes his eyes for a moment and is surprised by how long it takes to open them again and how heavy his eyelids have become. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

A hand picks up Danny’s wrist and lays it on the pillow. A hand in his hair strokes his scalp. “I’m just a ghost, dumbass.”

Sam wakes up in the early hours of morning to the wail of a tornado siren, his heart hammering in his throat. In a short period of initial disorientation, he thinks he’s in hell. It smells a little like hell, too, but the air seems too clean and the disco lights are gone. 

“Fuck,” he mumbles, just to say something and feel his vocal cords. He tries again, “Don’t let me wake up in Kansas.” 

His head feels strange, more clear than it has been in a long time – a long, long time – but every thought is out of focus. Sam presses his palms to his ears to momentarily block out the mechanical moans. The bed is empty, and the spot next to him feels cold when he rolls over it. Sam stands in the middle of the room and tries to get his bearings, but it’s too cold, too noisy. Wincing, he pulls on the only pair of pants lying on the floor and surveys the room as he’s collecting the rest of the clothes, pulling them on automatically. No power; two shirts for extra protection from the cold. The door to the hallway is open; underwear, dammit, too late to put it on. A note is on the table; socks and shoes from under the bed, and a twelve inch kitchen knife wrapped in a towel. Sam snatches up the note as he’s putting on his shoes and squints at the thick chicken scratch in black marker.

_“Got a 911 from John. Back soon. D.”_

“D is for Dumbass,” he says. “Should’ve woken me up.”

Sam pauses by the weapons safe, stares at the dial for a minute, and leaves it alone. The knife will have to do. If only there was a way to shut off the wailing of the tornado siren. There’s something about the sound itself that triggers some primitive sense of alarm in every person, low and chilling and disturbing. Sam walks out into the hallway with the knife ready. It must have been the alarm and the shock of being woken up by it that put him immediately on alert. It must have been. He tells himself that as he makes his way slowly down the stairs. 

The monster jumps him at the very bottom of the stairs. It must have been hiding in some dark niche, because Sam doesn’t see it until it’s on his back, until the claws are digging into his shoulders and the knees are squeezing his ribs. He jerks his head to the side out of some instinct, and a sharp beak strikes his shoulder where his neck would’ve been a moment ago.

The pain is like having a spear shoved in above his collarbone. Sam cries out and slams into a wall out of panic more than anything else. His shoulder has gone numb and the arm doesn’t obey when he tries to move it. The monster on his back tightens its grip on him. Sam can feel it gathering up for another strike and grabs it under the chin with his functional hand, using the monster’s momentum to toss it over his shoulder. The Sandman is surprisingly light, and Sam has some fleeting thought about porous bird bones before the monster is stretched out on its back on the floor and already twisting out of Sam’s one-handed grip. They jump apart, Sam backing away to the base of the stairs and trying to look around for the knife without losing sight of the Sandman. The monster circles to his right, staying on the wounded side, and Sam turns with it, holding his left hand up. There’s still numbness like lead in his right arm all the way from the shoulder to the tips of his fingers, too weak to lift up and practically useless in a fight.

The Sandman is tall, with a skinny frame and a raptor’s curved beak on a half-human face. Black eyes are fixed on Sam as it tries to circle him. Vaguely, from a distance, Sam can feel blood saturating his shirt where the claws dug in. 

“Winchester.” The Sandman’s voice is screechy and inhuman, like that of a trained parrot but full of malice unheard from any bird. “The animals are wrecking revenge on my children’s corpses.” 

Sam can’t think of an answer and doesn’t bother with it. The monster jumps at him the next moment. Sam tries to back away, tries to catch it in its flight, but the monster slams into him with a surprising strength and drops them both to the floor. Through the stars in his eyes, Sam sees the beak rise up, open, with its curved end casting a sharp shadow, and he throws his arm up to catch the Sandman’s head under the chin before it strikes. He feels the neck muscles buckling against his grip, the iron strength in them that makes his own arm shake. It’s a stalemate with the two of them locked in their positions and pushing against one another until one loses. The Sandman draws hoarse breaths. Clawed hands twist the front of Sam’s shirt, just inches away from his neck. Sam locks his elbow and grits his teeth and holds on. 

It goes on forever, with the siren wailing and the two straining against one another. Then Sam’s right arm recovers enough feeling to close around the handle of the knife that he dropped when the Sandman fell on him. 

His movement throws off the balance. The Sandman’s head falls, and Sam tries to stab with his right and roll out of the way at the same time, and when there’s a slash of pain along his shoulder blade, he doesn’t know if the Sandman got him or if he managed to plunge the knife into himself. He finishes the roll and stands on his hands and knees while his brain tries to catch up. Two hands, two legs – check. Pain in the upper back and down both arms, blood dripping but not gushing on the floor – check. The monster sitting with its back against the stairs and still alive – check. The knife buried in its side almost to the handle – check. 

They stare at each other for a moment, Sam and the Sandman. Slowly, the feeling begins to return, and Sam’s arms tremble under him. He pulls back until he’s mostly sitting on his heels. The Sandman pokes at the knife’s handle with one bird-like claw. The wound is bleeding profusely, dark pool growing and growing on the floor. The Sandman pokes at the knife again with an expression almost like curiosity. 

“You know what?” It looks up at Sam again. Pink foam froths at the corners of its beak from a punctured lung. “I already told the tornado where you work. A family for a family, Sam.” It caws and screeches as Sam scrambles up to his feet and runs out of the house. 

 

**NOLI ME TANGERE**

“There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the _aajej_ against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives…”

Dean turns the sound up on his phone lest he misses anything from Bobby’s book. The Impala is rolling through Kansas, as fast as he dares drive her without drawing the attention of the police. At one point, he got ridiculously nervous about approaching Lawrence with its baggage of bad memories, but then he got distracted and forgot all about it until the town was shrinking into the distance in his rearview mirror. Pennsylvania is still a far way east and Sam is still way ahead of him. The little shit is efficient and never sleeps these days. Dean worries constantly about catching up with him before he finishes the hunt and moves on to chase hell knows what other memory hell knows where.

“…The _khamsin,_ a dust in Egypt from March to May, named after the Arabic word for ‘fifty’, blooming for fifty days – the ninth plague of Egypt…”

Dean hums his acknowledgement. Bobby clears his throat and goes on. It’s about winds, all about winds in the Middle East and Africa, most of them malevolent and all personified by whatever culture was plagued by them.

“…As well as the other ‘poison winds’, the _simoom,_ of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness…” 

“Bobby,” Dean whines.

“Shut up. Listen to this: ‘One nation was so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.’”

“Very poetic. Didn’t you just tell me it was fiction?”

“So?”

“Just that—” Dean bites his nail and hisses in pain when he realizes it’s bitten down to the flesh. Fiction, dammit, fiction is what they spend their days chasing across the country. “Yeah, okay. What about these winds?” 

“I’ve heard some guy say once that these were demons, or jinni, or some other old and powerful shit, long since on lockdown.” 

Dean scratches his nose and considers the option. Wouldn’t that be a pain in the ass to hunt? Most importantly, would something like a sentient wind hold Sam up long enough? “But every place gets windy sometimes. You mean to tell me that weather is evil?” 

“Of course not. Look, Dean, there’re winds and then there’re _winds._ These sound sentient.” 

“But you said they were locked away?”

“It’s just a theory. Remember the Sins? There were the regular ones that everybody’s guilty of, and then there were the big demons.”

“Huh.” Dean squints at the horizon. There’re storm clouds up ahead that, admittedly, look no more evil to him than usual. 

“I thought of it when you told me to look at Pennsylvania. There’s been some funny shit going down there with the wind.”

“Funny ‘haha’ or funny ‘God help us’?”

“The second kind.”

“Figures.” Dean keeps staring at the storm clouds, at the way they roll and twist in the sky. “Hey, Bobby?”

“Yeah?” 

“You know, I swear, that wax thing I told you about looked like a tornado.”

Bobby is silent for a long minute. “You think Cas accidentally dragged something out of Hell with Sam?”

“Who knows? Except for Cas, that is, who won’t answer his calls.” 

“Easy, boy.”

“Fine, fine.” Dean drags a hand over his mouth. He realizes that his throat has gone dry. “Look into the tornado thing?” 

“You got it.” 

There’s nothing to do but drive after that. Dean stops when he can’t see straight anymore, sleeps during the day so that he can take the interstate through major cities at night and avoid traffic jams. He realizes that he forgot to ask Bobby what exactly was happening with the winds around Altoona but saves it for later, until Bobby calls with an update. In the last miles of Indiana, he starts telling aloud the stories he used to tell Sam in the backseat, grim old fairytales and strange modern stories he read somewhere at some point, has mostly forgotten and got mixed up. At one point, in the middle of the myth of Echidna that he mostly makes up as he goes along, Dean glances in the rearview mirror and meets Castiel’s eyes. By the time the Impala comes to a screeching stop, the backseat is empty again. 

“Cas! Goddammit, I’m not mad at you! Cas!”

He keeps watching the weather, hour after hour, state after state, but nothing about the wind seems particularly evil. It’s just more of the usual thing dragging rain and snow and dead leaves across the interstate. 

Barely over Pennsylvania’s border, he catches himself humming “Danny Boy” mindlessly. _And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me, and all my grave shall warmer, sweeter be, for you will bend and tell me that you love me and I will sleep in peace until you come to me._

By the time he reaches Altoona, Dean has been driving for twelve hours straight and wouldn’t have been able to stop for anything. A lazy snowfall is starting as the day is winding down. He gets lucky at the third motel where he stops to wave around the FBI badge and Sam’s picture. 

“Yeah, he’s staying here.” The owner, a lizard of a man in his seventies, adjusts his enormous glasses and blinks again at the photo. It’s very obviously a domestic shot and perhaps a little weird for a federal agent to be carrying around: Sam is half-naked in it, covered in grave dirt and looking exasperated. The owner frowns. “He’s been here since Tuesday. What’s he done?” 

Dean thinks about wringing the guy’s neck right here. “What room?”

“Seven, down that way.” He points, but Dean is already out the door.

He checks the room through the window first, peeking through an opening in the curtains. It appears occupied, but there’s no sign that Sam’s currently inside. Dean waits around for a good ten minutes before he picks the lock. 

Sam’s room smells vaguely like sickness, and that’s the first thing Dean notices. There’s a weak air of staleness, of dried sweat and cleaned up vomit, like when the occupant doesn’t really have the energy to do a thorough cleaning. Dean walks around, taking note of a bottle of pain pills, hot packs, and the soup containers in the trash can, with a notable absence of anything more substantial. Sam has been getting sicker then. Dean stomps down on his worry and instead studies the maps and printouts pinned to the wall. Newspaper clippings talk about weird local winds that broke or uprooted a few trees in the state park but had no other apparent effect. Some guy got tossed up a tree, and his broken body was found three days later. There’s local gossip of prowling whirlwinds the size of dogs which is ignored by the serious press. And in the middle of all of it is a marked map of the woods north of Altoona and a trapping ritual. 

It would make sense to wait inside, make a nice ambush, but patience has never been a strong suit for either him or Sam, and Sam is out there hunting something in the snow while getting sicker. Carefully, Dean copies down the map of Sam’s hunting grounds and makes sure the room is the way he found it before he leaves, in case the two of them miss each other along the way.

The snow has picked up, tiny specks of white having turned into downy lumps. By the time Dean finds what must be Sam’s car parked off the road in the woods, the sun has set and darkness is descending fast. Dean follows the track of partially obliterated footprints in the snow leading away from the car for about twenty minutes until he finds them under an oak – Sam and his monster. 

“He will crush your bones.” The thing tethered to the oak looks like a medium-sized monkey with pointy ears and an ugly face that’s more human than animal. It flicks its narrow black tongue as if tasting the air. “Your body will be his soon.”

“What’s he gonna crush my bones for then? So he can lie around like a pile of useless meat?” 

“Details.” The thing yanks on its leash and stretches its hand out as far as it will go, dragging its claws through the air maybe a foot away from Sam. Sam eyes it briefly and goes back to his task. 

Sam is digging a shallow hole in the frozen ground. He doesn’t look good, Dean thinks. From a few feet away, he can see how red Sam’s eyes are and the paleness of his face. He’s lost a lot of weight, and his hands are starting to look skeletal. 

The monkey thing twitches its nose in the air and looks straight at Dean through the trees and shadows. Dean stares back. There’s a weirdly human expression of uncertainty on its face, like it can’t decide if it would be beneficial to warn Sam. Dean can’t really blame it: that’s one bitch of a tricky situation. The decision is taken out of the monster’s paws the next moment, though, when Sam takes one look at it and draws a gun, pointing it directly at Dean’s hiding place. 

“Come out of the woods.”

The monkey thing makes a little squeal of delight and tries to leap up the tree trunk, but the leash won’t let it and it flops back down into the snow. Sam starts to back away toward the cover of the nearest tree.

“I can see you. Come out, or I’ll shoot.” 

“Okay, okay,” Dean says. “It’s just me, Sam.” 

He comes out into the small clearing slowly, with his empty hands where Sam can see them. For a moment, he wonders if Sam will shoot anyway. He doesn’t. He lowers the gun by an inch and lets Dean come a few steps forward until only the half-dug hole separates them. “That’s enough.”

Dean stops. “Okay.” Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the monkey monster reach out again to try and get one of them with its claws. He ignores it. “Hey, Sammy.” 

Sam looks even worse up close, like he’s been sick for too long, a low-grade, exhausting sort of illness that drains him slowly. Dean wonders if it’s the improperly placed soul or the tornado demon that’s doing that. Shit, for all he knows, it’s both. 

“Dean,” Sam says.

“Dean, Dean, Dean!” cries the monkey. “Dean, Dean! My master will crush your skull, too!”

“Shut up!” Sam kicks snow at it. It rolls its black eyes wildly and flicks its tongue and yanks on the leash. “How did you find me?”

“You wanna put the gun down?”

Sam narrows his eyes. “I’ll think about it.”

“Okay.” Dean spreads his hands for demonstration – no weapons. He nods toward the monkey. “Nice job.”

“Thanks. How did you find me?” 

“Because of Danny Broflovski.” 

The monkey cackles, a nasty dry sound that goes on and on. “Danny, Danny, Danny, Danny,” it cries. “My master is growing stronger among your guts.”

Sam turns completely white for a moment. Dean sees his hand with the gun drop and his eyes gloss over, and he’s over the hole in a second, catching Sam before he falls. Sam shakes himself off and pushes Dean’s hands away, but he doesn’t raise the gun again, at least. “Get away from me.” He breathes through his open mouth slowly for a few moments like he’s fighting off nausea. “What the hell, Dean, what does that have to do with anything?”

“See, you remember who that is. It took me three days.” 

“It was my alias, not yours.” 

“Sure it was, for a few days a million years ago.” Dean remembers then, out of the blue and with perfect accuracy, the way the kiss felt. He licks his lips automatically, and Sam’s eyes flick to his mouth. “You’ve been following your memories,” Dean says. “The witch gave me the name, so I knew you’d be in this state.” 

“He came right to me,” the monkey interrupts. They both turn to it, and it jumps up and down in its excitement. “He came right to me and brought my master in his belly, oh! I knew, I knew my master got out! He’s almost free, and he’ll crush both of you stupid humans.”

Dean nods toward the thing on the leash. “Is that about the tornado?” 

“For god’s sake!” Sam rolls his eyes. “I don’t even want to know what tornado, okay? This piece of shit wants its master, you want your little brother, and both are supposed to ride me, just like Lucifer was supposed to a year ago. No, thanks. I think I’ve had enough.” 

“Sam—”

“Oh! Oh no!” The monkey screams all of a sudden. “Oh no, no, no, no!” It thrashes and bounces off the oak’s trunk and throws itself on the ground. The mournful wail rolls through the winter woods, carrying through the air for what must be miles. “Oh no, oh my master, what did you do? What did you do?” 

Sam and Dean stare at it as it yanks its leash and screams, rakes the trampled snow with its claws and finally collapses on the ground, sobbing. Sam starts, “What’s its pro—”

Dean wouldn’t have been able to explain why he does what he does next. It’s a fit of stupidity fueled by desperation, inspired by hours in the car spent telling old fairytales to the memory of his little brother when he thought he was going insane from wanting Sam back so badly. Sam, flesh and bone and soul and stupid hair, to have and to hold, the way he was when he was Danny Broflovski, or Jimmy Page, or Angus Young, or Wedge Antilles. He grabs Sam’s head in both hands and presses his mouth against Sam’s. 

It’s dry, hard, and feels more like he’s trying to breath for Sam than like a kiss. Dean waits for a punch. Instead, Sam passes out. 

 

**TORNADO WARNING**

Sam floors the gas pedal all the way to town. “Welcome to–” he reads on a reflective green sign, flies by too fast to distinguish the rest, and it occurs to him for the first time that he has no idea what the name is. No matter. By the look of it, the place is about to get wiped off the map anyway.

The streets are abandoned, with no lights inside the houses and the tornado siren blaring away for nobody. Sam wouldn’t have been able to recall a face of a single citizen if he cared to try. None of it matters. He knows two faces here, and nothing else is important in the world.

He sees the tornado as he’s driving in – an ugly black funnel descending from the clouds in an empty field on the other side of town, behind the post office. The thick protrusion seems barely moving, but it’s halfway down to the ground already, and Sam knows better than to believe it immobile. He knows better than to drive straight for it, too, but between him and the tornado is the butcher shop with John and Dean still inside and possibly fighting off monsters at this very moment. Sam takes a turn at full speed, which almost sends the truck into a ditch.

_Dean Winchester._ Sam realizes that he’s thought his brother’s real name for the first time in a long time. It doesn’t feel nice to remember. It feels horrible, in fact, to have finally recovered Dean only to lose him all over again, this time for good. Sam prays and swears and drives faster. 

There’s a light in the second story window above the butcher shop, inside John’s apartment. Sam thinks he sees a shape move past the window. Of course they would be up there and not in the basement, the only two idiots in town. Sam falls out of the truck the moment it’s in the parking lot and almost gets thrown back by a gust of wind that pushes the car door to his chest. The tornado over the roofs looks like a mammoth foot about to stomp down on a toy town, and the siren moans of its approach. Sam runs through the shop area and the kitchen, past the freezers full of ominous dark shapes which seem to be moving and which he ignores, past the small staircase leading to the safety of a storm cellar. He takes the stairs two at a time and bursts through John’s bedroom door.

Dean and John look up at the same time. The figure on the couch doesn’t. Between the two of them, Sam can only see the bare feet, the top of the head and one arm hanging limply off the edge of the couch. There’s something wrong with the third person’s skin, what Sam can see of it. He thinks at first that this is more dead monster packaging he walked in on, and then he thinks that maybe it’s murder. 

“There’s a—” he starts. The figure on the couch moves, and now Sam can see a part of the face. It looks very tired. “There’s a tornado.” 

It’s his own face, he realizes, and the figure on the couch that Dean appears to be spoon-feeding and whose head John is holding is _him._ Tired, with half of his skin burned to crisp and both hands wrapped in thick bandages, but it’s him. The man gives a little wave when Sam won’t look away.

John gets up first, blocking his view. He takes Sam by the elbow and leads him out of the room, closing the door behind them, with an air of authority that Sam yields to before he can think to do otherwise. 

“Don’t worry about this,” John says. “Dean’s got it.”

Sam feels like the world is spinning, like the tornado already snatched him up and is dragging him across the state, round and round. Blink – and you’re in Oklahoma. Another blink – there’s Kansas looming on the horizon, and it’s not too far to Oz. The world is moving too fast, faster than he can process. _I was in Hell,_ he thinks. _I think I fell into a hole with the Devil._

“There’s a tornado,” he says instead. “It’ll be here any minute.” 

“We’re coming. You go down to the cellar.”

Sam steals a glance at the door. There’s a faint whispering coming from behind it, his brother’s voice, soothing but indistinguishable. The thoughts are coming too fast, a mixture of memories and images that gets tangled up with the weeks spent as Danny Broflovski, and Sam doesn’t think he can tell up from down anymore. “You’re dead,” he says, the first thing that pops into his head. “Aren’t you?” 

John shrugs. “Sure. We just guard this place, Sammy, keep the bad things away.” He looks over his shoulder at the door. “This guy in there, we’re just keeping him away from you. He has the memories you don’t want.”

“What is this place? Where the hell am I?”

The roaring of wind outside has almost drowned out the siren. Sam can hear things breaking, trees snapping like toothpicks, glass shattering, metal moaning.

“Go down to the cellar,” John says and gives him a little push that produces a sudden burst of pain. Sam forgot about the wounds from the fight with the Sandman. “We’re coming down in a minute. This tornado is worse than anything before it, it draws the monsters out, and you don’t wanna be caught by it, so go.” He gives him another push, harder this time. “Go, Sam!” 

Sam closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, the angle is strange. There is no house, no John, only rocks and dust and some indeterminate smudges, and he has his face pressed right into all of it. _I’m on the ground,_ he thinks. That’s progress. There’s a hand in front of him, gray with dust, and when Sam thinks about moving his fingers, the hand’s index and middle fingers make a little twitch. Okay, so it’s his hand. Sam lies quietly for a while, doing the inventory and studying what’s immediately in his visual field besides his hand and the dust. Something red is in the way. He wipes it from his eye, and now he can see a dented can of tuna to the right, sitting on the ground all by itself. Next to it is a corner of some metal structure which is too big for him to see in its entirety without moving, but he guesses it must be the truck flipped on its roof. 

Sam tries to cough and tastes iron and earth. He spits out what he can, but there’re still sand grains between his teeth. He tries to speak but only gets a weak little squeak at first. “Dean.” It doesn’t sound like his voice at all. “Dad?”

Trying to move his leg sends a flare of pain all the way up his spinal cord. Sam makes a croaking sound and doesn’t recognize himself again, feels tears in his eyes. Something’s throbbing terribly in his left knee, and his entire left side burns and screams like it’s being sliced. Sam pushes himself up, almost passes out from the pain, but manages something resembling a sitting position. He glances at his left leg once, notices the way it’s turned wrong and bleeding, decides not to look again. It doesn’t hurt if he doesn’t move it and doesn’t look.

There is no more butcher shop. Sam sits among the ruins next to his truck with its tires pointed at the sky. There should be rooftops on the horizon, but he doesn’t see any, only mounds of rubble, and it’s beyond him to even think about getting up. Sam swipes a hand over his eyes in hopes of clearing his vision, then stares at the blood and tears on it. 

_CRYBABY._

The voice comes from all directions, a thousand voices speaking at the same time. Only then Sam realizes that the siren is quiet and that there’s a low-frequency roar in the air, unchanged since he woke up. He turns, carefully. The tornado is there, a monstrous column against the sky a good distance away. Its body sits in place, rotating clockwise, a huge vortex of dirt and debris. 

_HI, SAM._

Sam swallows the lump in his throat. He doesn’t let himself think about the ruins of the butcher shop, shuts down that thought before it has time to form.

_I SAID ‘HI’._

“Hi.” It comes out hoarse. Sam spits out some more blood and earth.

_I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR YOU._

Dean would’ve been able to think of a good, smartass answer that would’ve gotten them both killed in two seconds flat. _Flat, get it?_ Sam feels laughter bursting up from his chest but it gets stuck in his throat and comes out half-cough and half-sob. _Oh god, Dean…_

_YOU’RE VERY QUIET._

The column shifts, sways from left to right as if the tornado is searching for a more comfortable position. Sam looks away, at the pile of broken wood and glass and metal all around him. Nothing seems to be moving underneath. He reaches out and lifts the end of what appears to be a door. There’s more rubble under it. Sam’s fingers shake, and the door slips out.

_I KILL YOU – AND THIS BODY IS MINE. AFTER SO MANY CENTURIES OF BEING LOCKED IN HELL, I CAN’T IMAGINE ANYTHING SWEETER._

Each one of the tornado’s voices carries a different emotion, a different expression. Some whisper while other roar, and yet others can’t seem to stop giggling between words. They’re slightly out of sync with one another, and the dissonance alone would’ve made long phrases hard to process. Sam doesn’t even try. He moves forward a little, which sends waves of pain up his leg. He has to stop and catch his breath for a minute. He pushes his hand under a piece of wall and tries to lift but it won’t budge.

_I WOULD LOVE TO HAVE YOUR BODY, SAM._

“Well.” Sam gets another hand under the piece of wall and pushes. Pain screams down his left side, but he manages to look underneath. Nothing’s there. He can feel sobs building in his chest again, because how is he ever going to see anything in the dust, in this mess, how is he even supposed to distinguish between a person and a piece of dirty garbage? He tries to focus on whatever the tornado said, to stop a full-blown panic. “Not gonna fit anyway.”

_YOU STUPID, INSIGNIFICANT PIECE OF DUNG. I CAN FIT ANYWHERE._

“Talk, talk, talk.” A couple of feet away, Sam spots the cellar door, exposed by some miracle, with the entire building lying in pieces around it. Maybe they had time to go downstairs. Maybe. Of course they did. Sam starts slowly pulling himself toward the door. 

_DO YOU EVEN REALIZE WHO YOU ARE TALKING TO?_

“A show-off the size of the Empire State Building.”

_I CAN SMASH YOU. I CAN TURN YOU INTO NOTHING._

Sam makes it to the trapdoor. He pushes pieces of the former meat shop off of it. “I never said you couldn’t. I’m just saying,” Sam yanks on the door, but it won’t open, “just saying that you’ll never fit.”

The tornado swells and undulates on the horizon. How ridiculous, Sam thinks, that the sky is so blue right above, as if the tornado is pulling all the storm clouds into itself, feeding off them. The tornado screeches in its thousand voices, a sound of mortal offense. 

_YOU DARE DOUBT ME, YOU LITTLE INSECT?_

There’s a smashed can next to Sam’s elbow, leaking tuna juice from a small puncture in the aluminum casing. Sam’s head is not working all that clearly. There’s room in his brain for the thought about finding his brother, and the tornado, well, it just doesn’t fit. Sam picks up the can and waves it in the air. “Prove it, dipshit.” 

With a sound like a train crash, the tornado suddenly collapses on itself. Sam feels a gust of wind hit him in the back and pull him a couple of feet closer to the tornado and away from the cellar door. The wind column on the horizon becomes a thin needle, then it thins even more, becoming finer by the second. Debris rains from the sky all around it. The foot of the column lifts up from the ground and reaches horizontally toward Sam, who’s still sitting among the ruins with a tuna can in his outstretched hand. In front of him, there’s no longer a monster in the sky. The needle-like vortex screams in triumph as it touches the crack in the can and is gone within seconds, releasing a final spurt of tuna juice that runs down Sam’s hand and stings in the open wounds. 

Numbly, Sam puts his thumb over the crack. There’s a terrible ringing in his ears. He roots around in the pocket of his jeans until he find a piece of gum. It tastes like dust and iron when he chews it. Dean could’ve come up with some great line, like maybe, _Well, look who’s been down in Hell for too long. Falling for the oldest tricks in the book._ No, Dean’s would’ve been better. Sam spits out the gum into his hand and seals up the crack.

It takes him twenty minutes to open the trapdoor. Halfway through it, Sam realizes he’s sobbing again, and it’s hard to breathe through the constriction in his chest. When the door finally gives way, the inside of the cellar is pitch-black. There must be something wrong with his perspective, perhaps his eye is more damaged than he thought, because Sam can see a speck of light impossibly far away, as if miles below the ground. 

He starts crawling. 

 

**EPILOGUE**

In Minnesota, Dean wakes up because he can’t breathe with Sam’s arm tossed across his throat. The man is a sleep strangler, has been for as long as Dean can remember. He wriggles up in bed until Sam’s arm is on his chest and he can draw in air again. Dean lies there quietly, studying the shadows cast on the ceiling by the pre-dawn light. It’s nice to share a bed with somebody again. He doesn’t get to do this very often. It’s uncomfortable every time, but sharing a bed is a symbol of closeness, and Dean has an appreciation for symbols. Even if Sam is too big. Later, they’ll get separate beds, he thinks, maybe after another couple of nights. He enjoys waking up at random intervals to find Sam asleep and not sitting in the dark, staring at him from across the room. 

Sam grumbles in his sleep and pulls his arm away to stuff it under the pillow. Dean avoids thinking of the last person who used to sleep in the same bed with him. Instead, he studies the line of Sam’s shoulder, the skin gone pale this far into winter, the tiny dark mole, the outlines of muscle under the skin. He imagines that muscle in Sam’s arm, dark pink in its shiny sheath, imagines the overlaying nerves and blood vessels, the tendon anchoring it down, the bone, deep underneath. Those muscles and tendons and bones don’t have a mind of their own anymore, but Dean feels sometimes – like right now – that he needs to watch them closely. Just in case they get any ideas. Dean wonders what his body would’ve done, where it would’ve gone if left to its own devices. 

Carefully, he climbs out of bed and makes his way into the bathroom, shutting the door and turning on the lights. He pulls off his clothes, turns on the shower, and stands under the hot spray. He wriggles his toes for the sake of an experiment, stares down at them. “Don’t even think about it,” he tells them. 

Dean runs a bar of soap over his skin, washing away invisible traces of last night. If anyone ever asked him, hey, Winchester, you ever been in trouble with the law? Yes, he would have to say, yes, but the police got it all wrong. Has he ever killed a man, then? Yes, technically, but they all had demons in them, and it’s the demons that he and Sam were aiming for. _Hey, you ever had sex with your brother? Well, define ‘sex’…._ Life is full of tricky situations, Dean thinks, watching the soap swirl around his toes and get tugged into a little whirlpool over the drain. It’s been a week since he dragged Sam back from the woods in Pennsylvania, since Sam woke up and looked at him like _Sam_ , not like some impersonator – and Sam’s eyes are creepy, creepy things when left to tend for themselves, by the way. Since then, it’s been a little nerve-wracking to stay apart for long, so they hold on at night, and he supposes it might have gone a little too far once or twice. 

Chicken, he tells himself. He thinks of Lisa, allows his mind to go there for a minute. _Way to go. Say that it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t even for lust, it wasn’t technically sex, it was your brother anyway._ Maybe he hadn’t talked to Lisa in months and didn’t think he’d ever go back, but it hurts a little to let go, regardless. Dean has a feeling like something good happened and something bad happened, and he’s just waiting to see which one will win. 

He shuts off the water and wraps a towel around his hips, and just then the lights flicker.

“Shit!” says Sam’s voice from the room, muffled by the door. “Sorry.”

Dean opens the door. Sam is in the motel room’s small kitchen, still wearing the clothes he slept in and evidently having a fight with the toaster. He looks at Dean and shrugs. 

“Okay,” Dean says, “this little problem is next on our list, ‘cause I’m not making you food.” He takes the toaster’s cord from Sam and plugs it into the outlet. Nothing happens. Dean pushes the bread down.

“I figure it has something to do with the tornado demon.” Sam eyes the toaster and moves away a little. He caused a power blowout in two motels and destroyed Bobby’s waffle maker before they figured out what was happening. They still have to replace the waffle maker.

Dean goes back to the bed and starts pulling on his clothes. “Cas didn’t find any trace of it,” he says.

“Still. I never use to destroy appliances before, did I?”

Dean doesn’t bother answering. The way he figures, there’s a storm broken down, digested, and buried inside his brother somewhere. Most of the time, they can’t tell. It’s just that sometimes, Sam can make the radio go static in the car if he thinks too loud, and sometimes when he laughs, Dean can hear distant thunder. At night, Sam makes Dean’s skin prickle like from a weak electrical current. 

Sam butters and surrenders the first two pieces of toast. Dean bites into one and watches Sam’s fingers, the way they pause for a moment before pushing down two more slices of bread. No sparks fly. Small red lights start blinking over the toaster’s dial, counting down minutes. 

“Okay,” Dean says. “Let’s make it today, then.”

Sam blinks at him. “Make what today?”

“Story time. I wanna know what you did to that tornado.”

“Ugh.” Sam scratches the back of his neck. “Dean, I’m not exactly sure.”

“Come on, tell me the story.” Seeing the look of unease on Sam’s face, he offers, “I’ll tell you mine. It has a dumb ending, you’ll love it.” 

“Okay,” Sam says. “But your dumb ending has nothing on my dumb ending.”

Dean snorts and tries to think of a good place to start, one that doesn’t involve a cemetery and a man falling down a hole. He realizes then that he feels good, actually feels very good, and that all the earlier uncertainties and reservations have left him alone for now. Sam grins at him expectantly, like he used to in the backseat of the Impala during long drives between states. Dean says, “There once was a man whose nose ran away from him.”

Sam laughs then, and Dean imagines that he can hear thunder rolling in the distance.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The idea of two independent stories that converge in the end was *coughcough* borrowed from _Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World_ by Haruki Murakami. It's a fantastic book, and I highly recommend it. It has disgusting underground monsters, a mad scientist and a weird city - what's not to like? The two separate titles, the "Danny Boy" reference and the fact that one story takes place literally inside the other all were inspired by the book. I did not, however, rewrite the plot or - consciously - borrowed any other elements from it. 
> 
> 2\. Dean’s story about the man whose nose ran away from him is, apparently, “The Nose” by Nikolai Gogol. A Unkranian classic is a bit more sophisticated than I intended, but I, too, forgot what the story was, except for how there was an escaped nose that pretended to be human. I came across a mention of it again by accident, while telling a co-worker about “Viy”, also by Gogol, which is a kickass horror story. ("LIFT MY EYELIDS!" Anyone, anyone?)
> 
> 3\. The eye-stealing Sandman is from “The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffman. I also highly recommend that one. _"Whose hideous voice is this?_
> 
> 4\. The ritual with hot wax and cold water is real. I had it done over my head a couple of times, before I was old enough to know about free will. The anti-incest spell is real, too. Yeah, I know.
> 
> 5\. Many thanks to my brother-in-law for telling me about oxyacetylene beach ball bombs and hairspray potato cannons. I assume everyone is an adult here, but just in case: don't do it. Because then, like Dean said, people are gonna be asking, "Why are you guys running around with no hands?"
> 
> 6\. According to my research, there isn't actually an amusement park near Moon Township, PA. But there used to be, though it's been gone for a while, along with all its equipment. My apologies to any locals who happen to run by. Your state is wonderfully creepy, guys.


End file.
